America's Lost Tribeļ¼ The Puritans & Greater Appalachia's Role In Their Disappearance
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 24 minutes
Words per Minute
182.3767
Hate Speech Sentences
100
Summary
In this episode, Simone and I discuss the role of Calvinist settlers in early America, and how they influenced the founding of the country. We also discuss the history of the Puritans and their influence on the rest of the founding groups.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello, Simone! I am excited to be here with you today.
00:00:03.300
This will be our second episode going over some of the concepts,
00:00:07.700
what we think they got right and what we think they got wrong, of the book.
00:00:14.040
which was inspired by one of our favorite books of all time,
00:00:20.000
And this divides America into 11 cultural groups,
00:00:23.840
and I will put a map on screen here so you can see it.
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And in the last episode we did on this, which you can check out,
00:00:31.480
is he thought that the Puritan cultural group in the Northeastern United States
00:00:37.420
ended up being the core mountain head of current Yankee culture
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or the Northeastern coastal culture in the United States,
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where we argue this is fundamentally wrong-headed,
00:00:49.760
that that culture actually stems from Catholicism,
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which for a long time made up the majority population in these regions
00:00:59.060
so even though, just to briefly cover some concepts from the last one
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Catholics at the time of America's founding were an incredibly small part of the colonies.
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So they just were not a big cultural force in America
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until the Irish, Italian, and now Hispanic immigration waves,
00:01:23.840
which led to the Catholic population becoming the predominant cultural wellspring
00:01:34.100
Specifically, in the last episode, we focused a lot on how they were the wellspring of the Yankee cultural group,
00:01:38.760
but they are also the wellspring of the El Norte cultural group,
00:01:41.180
which is the Hispanic cultural group in the city,
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and the far-left cultural group that is on the west coast.
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And if I put a map here of America's districts by primary religious affiliation,
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you will see there is a huge overlap with all the blue strongholds
00:02:00.540
So now we want to go, or at least these specific blue strongholds,
00:02:10.200
Now, what we want to do is go into a question that springs up.
00:02:14.700
And it's a very interesting question, if you've read LBNC.
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Is, okay, these are the four cultures that form the foundation of America.
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Because the Backwoods people, which I'm descended from, the greater Apple.
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We will, in this episode, talk about this culture and its background.
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But I think a lot of people are a bit mystified about what happened to these three other.
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It's kind of cool in American history, by the way, if you like study it.
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It's like, well, there are really unique founding groups in the country.
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How did they end up actually influencing the cultures that came downstream of them?
00:03:06.460
However, it was the, well, a separate episode on how the Quakers died out.
00:03:10.740
Because that's a very interesting story in and of itself.
00:03:13.620
But today, we're going to talk about the Puritans, what they broadly stood for,
00:03:19.320
how one group of the Puritans, or I'd say the Calvinist settlers in early America,
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because there were two big groups here, which I think is really undersold.
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The Backwoods people, the Backwoods group, the greater Appalachian group,
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They generally got along with the Puritan group.
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And they ended up, actually, here's a great example of how well they got along with the Puritan group.
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So there was something called the Paxton Boys uprising.
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And in it, because the Quakers always trying to bureaucratically control everything,
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were giving their districts like half the vote that the Quaker districts had,
00:04:00.880
And they also had created a situation in which the Indians were constantly attacking
00:04:05.620
And they were like, we don't really care, I guess.
00:04:09.720
I mean, talk about other, there's so much of like American lore,
00:04:15.860
So it was actually around this, the time of the Paxton Boys,
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like leading up to this, that the famous giving Indians smallpox infected blankets thing came from.
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And people are like, oh, oh, that's so horrible.
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And it's like, you know, they had just killed over 2,000 settlers and were besieging a settlement.
00:04:42.320
Like they were trying to save a settlement that was under siege.
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Like, is it bad, like by modern warfare standards?
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If you are behind the walls of a city and you know a group just butchered like the two cities next to you
00:05:00.880
and killed all the women and children and you've got your family there,
00:05:03.820
are you not going to try everything you can think of to try to protect yourself?
00:05:08.640
Because you have sent requests to the local Pennsylvania government,
00:05:15.120
I mean, yeah, I kind of have, like, with all things in life right now,
00:05:26.820
Like maybe they didn't expect biological warfare.
00:05:32.620
Well, this is actually a really interesting thing about the Backwoods people.
00:05:37.160
So we're going to talk about where they came from,
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but also a really interesting thing about them culturally.
00:05:41.200
Because they had a relationship with the Indians that was both incredibly more brutal
00:05:46.240
than any of the other founding American cultural groups.
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Yeah, I think many American cultural groups saw them as equal to the Native American,
00:05:55.840
because they were equally brutal in some of their behaviors vis-a-vis other groups.
00:06:04.260
But first, let's just, like, let's talk about where they came from more broadly.
00:06:07.220
So they were the second wave of immigrants into the United States.
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Or you could really say the first wave of people who felt like European immigrants in America.
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I think the second wave of immigrants was more the Cavaliers,
00:06:21.040
followed by the Quakers, then followed by the Scots-Irish.
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What I mean is they were the first wave of distinctly culturally different white Europeaners
00:06:37.000
coming to already white European-settled parts of America.
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Yes, the Cavaliers came as a separate wave, but they were mostly setting up...
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They were settling in indigenous lands in totally foreign territory,
00:06:48.460
not competing with existing UK-based groups, right?
00:06:52.720
Yes, but, like, when the Quakers came and set up Philadelphia,
00:06:55.280
it wasn't like there was a big existing settlement there.
00:06:57.600
When the Anglers came and the Puritans came and set up Massachusetts,
00:07:02.660
When the Backwoods people came, or what became the greater Appalachian culture,
00:07:06.660
all of the stuff on the coastline was pretty much already settled.
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And unlike the later Irish and Italian immigrant waves, the Catholic immigrant waves,
00:07:16.180
these people were much more discriminated against than any other really white population group
00:07:23.420
that entered America to the extent that they almost were unable to settle in any already settled region.
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There wasn't yet this idea that America was, like, this mixing pot yet.
00:07:39.580
Because that's what they were seen as by the existing population.
00:07:42.360
They were mostly Irish and Scottish clan people, I guess is what I call them.
00:07:48.020
They had been through centuries of clan warfare.
00:07:51.820
They were an incredibly honor-based people in an honor-based culture.
00:07:56.340
But they were also, I won't say lawless, they believed in law, but, you know, they'd have blood feuds,
00:08:03.600
Well, there's honor-based law, and then there's civil law.
00:08:06.660
And they were on a more honor-code-based system where when you have a feud,
00:08:11.340
it is settled by your people through a blood feud or through vigilante justice,
00:08:15.820
rather than you going to a centralized authority and saying,
00:08:19.540
oh, mommy, they did something bad, punish them.
00:08:26.900
Yeah, no, they kept coming and setting up, what were the names of the regulators?
00:08:31.700
So they set up separate governments ruled by something called the regulators, which-
00:08:38.600
But let's talk about how this all ended up happening as well,
00:08:41.100
because this is important before we get to what ended up happening to the Puritans.
00:08:44.060
So these people came over, nobody wanted them in their cities.
00:08:47.880
They were seen as incredibly, like, crime-full people.
00:08:52.980
And loose women, and the women had higher skirts, low bust lines.
00:09:03.900
Yeah, they were very, well, they were a clan-based, low-class group.
00:09:08.360
They were the first group that, like, really was not in any way intellectual or upper class.
00:09:16.180
And they were fleeing regional violence from people like themselves.
00:09:20.240
And so they got into these cities, and in part because the cities could immediately be like,
00:09:26.880
Go to the frontier, which at the time was the Appalachian Mountains and the area right before
00:09:32.660
the Appalachian Mountains, like, just outside of all of the settled areas.
00:09:35.540
Which is poetically quite appropriate, because the Appalachian Mountains are actually the same
00:09:40.260
mountain range as the Scottish Highlands, just before they got split up into different continents.
00:09:46.880
And these people, this actually worked out really good for everyone to begin with.
00:09:51.660
So the reason it worked out so good is there were a lot of really dangerous Indian groups.
00:09:56.500
And you had these, like, pansy, like, Quakers, right, who refused to fight at all.
00:10:01.060
They would actually have, like, pirates just, like, plunder their settlements, and they'd do
00:10:06.460
And, yeah, so Ben Franklin, who was a Puritan based in Philadelphia, would be like, I could
00:10:12.520
explain to our enemies that, like, we do not retaliate for this.
00:10:15.900
And they wouldn't even come attacked because they wouldn't believe that anyone would act
00:10:20.160
It is so insane that you're refusing to do anything.
00:10:24.880
And then you have the Puritans, who were a hard people, but they, well, they didn't have
00:10:30.460
as much problem with the Indians for a couple reasons.
00:10:34.200
Like, they were willing to defend themselves, and they were very prickly.
00:10:36.260
But also, they would intentionally settle the least productive lands, the most stony fields
00:10:42.100
and everything like that, because they believed that, you know, the harder you made your life,
00:10:46.480
the more favor God was giving you, that, like, God gave you favor through intentionally choosing
00:10:53.160
And the Puritans, keep in mind, settled in the northeast of the United States at a time
00:10:59.700
It had much harsher winters than it does today.
00:11:02.360
So right now, the south, for example, where the Cavaliers and future southerner groups settled
00:11:08.160
is pretty much climatically the same now as it used to be.
00:11:11.680
But New England was very different and very harsh.
00:11:15.060
Yeah, and so these people were pushed out because the Quakers, if they had a boundary
00:11:20.800
of these angry Klan people, the Indians couldn't get through them.
00:11:24.780
You know, the Indians ended up fighting the Klan people, and the Klan people would fight
00:11:28.700
Now, it caused problems, and this is one of the things, where the Quakers, the Quakers
00:11:33.400
I will never get away from this lie that Quakers were, like, anti-slavery.
00:11:37.540
When we know from Quaker wills that 43% of Quakers owned slaves, they just were vocally
00:11:43.020
They had higher slave ownership rates than aristocratic southerners during the slave-owning
00:11:49.180
It was like, we'll say something's bad, but then, you know, in our actions, we'll cause
00:11:53.640
So they're like, oh, we will always treat the Indians nice, and we will always pay for their
00:11:58.540
land, unlike those Puritans who, like, do, you know, sort of cheaty deals with them.
00:12:04.240
But then how did they actually treat the Indians?
00:12:05.580
Well, they took these warlike Klan people, they put them all around the Indian land, and
00:12:10.340
then they used them for protection, and they kept killing the Indians, and the Indians kept
00:12:14.820
So ultimately, if you look at the Indian tribes that were in the Quaker areas, they actually
00:12:18.700
ended up dying out at higher rates than the Indian tribes in the Puritan areas.
00:12:22.860
Because, again, it's, you know, technically they're pro-Indian, except they settled these, like,
00:12:29.000
bloodthirsty, my ancestors, people next to them.
00:12:32.900
So now we've got to get into how these people ended up relating to the Indians, and why it
00:12:36.360
was so different from any of the other early American groups.
00:12:39.300
And it really shows, in our show, I say I'm a pluralist, right?
00:12:45.360
But people here, Malcolm's a pluralist, like a dyed-in-the-wooled pluralist of the old Appalachian
00:12:51.320
variety, and what they think I'm saying is I'm an equalist.
00:12:55.040
You know, that I believe that all cultural practices are equal, and all people are equal.
00:13:01.580
You'll understand when you understand how the Blackwoods people related to the Indians.
00:13:04.520
So the Quakers would be like, I respect the Native Americans' human dignity, right?
00:13:09.260
But they didn't take time to understand, or know, or live with the Indians.
00:13:15.380
They, like, superficially, academically respected the Indians.
00:13:19.560
But they didn't actually, like, engage with the Indians.
00:13:23.680
The Backwoods people, they were very known and actually very hated from the other people.
00:13:32.680
We didn't some children of mixed Backwoods and Indigenous pairings,
00:13:39.000
become significant leaders within Native American communities.
00:13:45.960
And some of the Backwoods people would actually just go and move in
00:13:49.340
and convert to the Indian communities and ways of life.
00:13:55.480
It's not as though many, for example, Scottish settlements
00:13:59.020
were that different from many Indigenous American settlements.
00:14:09.700
And in that, they were similar, but they were culturally quite different.
00:14:16.040
But sometimes I feel like lifestyle and culture...
00:14:24.040
oh, they were these backwards savages living off the land.
00:14:27.660
The Indians were backwards savages living off the land.
00:14:29.860
And look, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that there's this perception.
00:14:42.140
They were no more similar to the Indians than they were to the Quakers,
00:14:46.460
The only way, the only one dimension they were similar to the Indians
00:14:52.760
They had different clans similar to the Indians,
00:14:56.500
But because of that, when they came into these Indian areas,
00:15:00.620
they saw the Indians with genuine human dignity,
00:15:05.820
as a separate clan that was in a clan-based conflict with them.
00:15:10.580
But this also meant that they would regularly go butcher Indian towns
00:15:14.100
in a way that the Puritans and the Quakers never, ever would.
00:15:23.720
They would intermarry with them when they made sense.
00:15:25.300
They would join their communities when they liked those specific communities.
00:15:28.280
But they also treated them as a full equal in terms of clan competition.
00:15:34.420
And for them, that meant regularly go in and raid their settlements.
00:15:41.740
We're only treating them with the same respect that we treat our own.
00:15:46.340
But when you're back, that's a little different, isn't it?
00:15:48.980
Yeah, because they were admittedly, they weren't as brutal as the most brutal Indians,
00:15:57.200
but they were close in terms of the areas that they came from.
00:16:02.260
And in those areas, they were often the most brutal of the parts of Scotland in Ireland,
00:16:08.820
But keep in mind, this group, again, was not the Catholics from Ireland.
00:16:11.720
This was the Protestants in Ireland, who were the Irish who were part of this community.
00:16:19.820
So the Scotch-Irish, these are the Scots who were moved to Ireland.
00:16:22.720
They were brought there by earlier English to rule over the parts of it,
00:16:28.600
It's not really rule over it, because they were more like enforcers or brutes
00:16:32.320
for the English population, because they wanted a particularly sort of bloodthirsty,
00:16:39.300
And so that's what I mean when I say I mean pluralism.
00:16:42.160
I mean pluralism so that on equal terms, the strong can defeat the weak.
00:16:47.720
They can learn what, like of the people who are different from us,
00:16:55.180
What can we, and then we take that stuff and we use it to do better ourselves.
00:16:59.760
Now, I do not believe that we should be in a system like they were,
00:17:02.940
where the strong against the weak is the people who literally kill the other people should win.
00:17:08.660
I think we're civilizationally beyond that point.
00:17:12.140
But what I mean is I think we should be able to economically,
00:17:16.840
cross-culturally compete against other groups without putting training wheels on some groups,
00:17:21.840
either from an ethical perspective, i.e. you can't compete with those people
00:17:25.620
because they're in a weaker position than you or something like that,
00:17:28.640
or through affirmative action or through anything like that.
00:17:34.820
And it's so interesting to me that this all-compete attitude in a way assigns more human dignity
00:17:41.720
to the other than the attitude of, well, these, you know, poor little whatever minority,
00:17:49.360
we need to give them all sorts of special stuff because goodness knows they can't work on their
00:17:55.520
And I also believe this free competition mindset, I hold it because I believe it helps even the
00:18:03.700
So you can see this, and I'll put on screen here some graphs of Black Americans and Hispanic Americans
00:18:10.060
who were in Democrat-controlled districts versus Republican-controlled districts had closer to
00:18:18.920
So they were intergenerationally improving and getting close to a point where they were equal
00:18:22.800
with the existing white population, whereas in the Democrat areas, they were not improving.
00:18:28.880
Because of course you're not going to improve when you're putting training wheels on everything,
00:18:31.560
Like the goal is individual cultural improvement.
00:18:35.520
Well, the goal is to give people resources that empower them.
00:18:42.180
It's the whole teach a man to fish thing rather than disempowering them.
00:18:46.540
There's been systematic infantilization and disempowerment taking place in progressive communities.
00:18:53.300
Did you have anything else you wanted to say about this community before I move further?
00:19:03.560
They were really, as we've already said, looked down upon by the Quakers extremely,
00:19:11.100
because that was a group that they were engaging with most.
00:19:13.340
And the German settlers who were like the Quaker society, so we're going to talk a little bit
00:19:17.760
about the society that became the Midland Cultural Group, which I'll show on the map here.
00:19:27.380
You had some of the German settlers who were mostly like really industrious farmers and just
00:19:33.260
wanted to be left alone and didn't really want any position of governments.
00:19:36.980
And then you had the elite class, which was the Quakers.
00:19:44.420
They ran all the slave operations, and they ran most of the political offices.
00:19:48.160
And they used these positions to essentially oppress the two other groups, the backwoods
00:19:53.800
people who they removed the ability to get votes from.
00:19:58.520
And the German settlers, but the German settlers didn't really care.
00:20:01.380
They, in part, are the group that we now know of.
00:20:05.580
This was one part of this faction, but it's still the most culturally preserved of this original
00:20:10.140
And so you had this system where because the Germans didn't focus on anything other than
00:20:17.440
education tied to efficiency of their farm labor, and because the backwoods people really
00:20:23.000
saw learning as a fairly pointless thing to do.
00:20:28.740
They didn't believe in higher education in the way any of the other cultures did, so they
00:20:34.940
They also didn't believe in capital accumulation.
00:20:36.980
So I want to talk about this really quickly because this is important.
00:20:39.080
Why didn't they believe in capital accumulation?
00:20:41.420
Because the other Calvinist groups all heavily believed in capital accumulation.
00:20:47.380
So let's talk about how the Puritan, in their view of capital accumulation, created modern
00:20:51.640
So they believed that God showed his favor to people by how successful you were, specifically
00:20:57.540
for them because they lived in the business world, right?
00:21:00.940
But if you spend any of that money on yourself, like aggrandizing yourself in the eyes of other
00:21:05.980
people, on art, on flashy things, then you were showing that you had sort of failed the
00:21:12.320
test that God had given you, and that test was success.
00:21:14.740
And Scrooge is very much a character who represents this old Calvinist Puritan set.
00:21:22.860
Okay, so they agreed with the Puritans on that.
00:21:27.360
But they were in this clan-based system, right?
00:21:30.780
That was like, yeah, but if you ever accumulated too much capital, your neighbors would just
00:21:38.400
You know, if you got a bunch of cows and your neighbors would come and steal those cows,
00:21:45.200
And this is something that is really noticed in...
00:21:47.600
I read in a previous episode about my ancestors and the people used to like their parents episode.
00:21:54.300
And in that episode, one of the things that my ancestor was noting about his dad is he had
00:21:59.420
so many opportunities to make money through investment and stuff like that.
00:22:02.480
But he just seemed allergic to even attempting to make money.
00:22:07.280
And it was because he came from this clan-based system.
00:22:09.500
These people who, when the South was revolting, they started counter-revolutions to try to,
00:22:17.080
And we'll talk about why they were against slavery.
00:22:20.120
And they were like, okay, we'll do our own thing here.
00:22:22.260
But they'd already gone through this a few times.
00:22:24.040
You know, go fight with your neighbors, create breakaway states.
00:22:26.380
This is where, you know, 15 of his brothers or siblings were one of the 50 founding members
00:22:34.000
We're all out there dying so they can stay rich.
00:22:36.400
Tax collectives coming around here, taking everything.
00:22:40.940
No man ought to tell another man what he's got to live for or what he's got to die for.
00:22:44.840
So, you know, heavy, heavy relation to that sort of movement.
00:23:00.400
So these people didn't have the same relation to capital accumulation that the Puritans did.
00:23:05.520
It was more like status accumulation was what mattered more than traditional capital accumulation
00:23:18.740
You needed to accumulate honor for the sake of accumulating honor.
00:23:23.240
But also this honor was the currency in which this community dealt.
00:23:31.360
There wasn't really so much of an external governing mechanism.
00:23:33.760
Honor was the judicial system, the economy, the social capital, the respect, and the negotiating
00:23:44.220
Well, I should be clear that they actually had a currency and it was a hard alcohol and
00:23:49.940
That's what they used as a currency in their districts.
00:23:52.840
Just to give you an idea of the type of people they were.
00:23:54.980
But they also related to morality quite differently than the Puritans.
00:23:57.700
Speaking of which, though, just random thing, it has been mentioned in a couple of videos
00:24:02.980
I've been listening to about Mormon culture that a lot of Mormons in their emergency supplies
00:24:07.660
save like large jugs of vodka as a currency for like an apocalyptic event.
00:24:18.380
It actually makes me want to buy more vodka because it's not a bad idea.
00:24:28.280
So and keep in mind, we'll get to their counter governments in a second because they're actually
00:24:32.880
But I should also hear talk about their ethical system because it was a little different than
00:24:41.540
They believed that, you know, pretty much everything is a sin.
00:24:51.560
Anything you do for the pure sake of happiness, like personal happiness, is broadly a sin.
00:25:00.640
And so they they the Puritans were like, oh, well, then we need to not do any of those
00:25:08.120
Like, I know we'll break the rule sometimes, but broadly, we should try not to do any of
00:25:12.200
those things, which is very different from the the the Catholics came in.
00:25:16.200
And the Catholics had this deontological set where there's some sins and some not sins
00:25:19.780
like sports isn't as high of a sin is, say, like extramarital sex or, you know, music
00:25:30.140
For nerds wondering about the biblical logic behind each of these interpretations, for one
00:25:35.880
interpretation, the one where sexual sins are an ultra big deal and other sins aren't
00:25:41.320
You could look at quotes like from Corinthians flee for your sexual immorality.
00:25:45.080
All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually sins against
00:25:52.000
The problem here is that this is very clearly in context, speaking of prostitution and only
00:25:58.080
prostitution, as the paragraph immediately preceding this line is all about prostitution
00:26:06.420
Which and we will go over this in a future one of our tracked episodes, I would argue is
00:26:10.060
considered a unique form of sin because it has a chance of bringing an unwanted child
00:26:15.700
And the sin is the potential of creating that child.
00:26:19.940
And that's what it means to sin against the body.
00:26:21.980
By that, what we mean here is in this part, it talks of two people becoming one body when
00:26:27.900
But obviously, two people don't literally become one body when they have sex, except insofar
00:26:33.140
as one person gets pregnant and then they literally do become one body in the form of the child
00:26:39.560
and one spirit in the form of the child, if you look at the lines immediately above it.
00:26:45.140
Whereas alternatively, you can look at lines like, whether therefore you eat or drink or
00:26:50.440
whatever you do all to the glory of God, or, and he died for all, all those who live should
00:26:57.100
no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again, or, and
00:27:03.020
whatsoever you do, do it heartily as to the Lord and not unto men, or, but if you have
00:27:09.180
doubts about whether or not you should eat something, you are sinning if you go ahead
00:27:12.820
and do it, for you are not following your convictions.
00:27:15.620
If you do anything you believe is not right, you are sinning.
00:27:18.780
So in all of these quotes, the basic gist is, is anything that you are not doing for the
00:27:25.460
So if you can't reasonably argue that what you just did, you did for the glory of God,
00:27:30.620
It's not that everything that you're not doing for God is a sin where these two groups
00:27:35.540
broadly believe that, but the backwards people, they related to this very differently.
00:27:39.180
They're like, Oh yeah, all of those things are sin, but like, I'm still human, bro.
00:27:44.360
Like I will try to do good in the moment when it makes sense and aligns with my honor code.
00:27:51.040
But I know that I may as well, like, as long as I'm going to be here and it is not a time
00:27:57.460
when I otherwise could be dedicating myself fully and meaningfully to God.
00:28:01.500
Like they didn't do the constant Bible study and everything like that.
00:28:06.440
And they were known by the other people as constantly partying, but also engaging with
00:28:11.980
low culture because of, they saw, you know, hanging out and partying with the bros as an
00:28:18.500
equal sin, you know, having some drinks and doing a jig.
00:28:21.100
And I remember this about my ancestors, there was a time when the Confederacy had captured
00:28:30.840
And he, he, he came into the Confederate camp and he brought a bunch of booze with him and
00:28:37.520
he got them all drunk and played the fiddle so transfixingly and apparently did a traditional
00:28:44.380
Scottish, like, jig thing so amazingly that they were able to have another guy sneak around
00:28:52.020
and free all of the prisoners while the Confederate guards were distracted by my great, great, great
00:28:59.500
And I love this because it's so like a, a trickster God sort of a thing to do from like
00:29:05.160
But that was the type of people they were, you know?
00:29:10.520
But, you know, sometimes a jig can be a part of that.
00:29:13.020
Sometimes drinking can be a part of that, you know, uh, so they, they can play a role
00:29:19.260
Now, what this means is because they didn't distinguish between different types of sin,
00:29:23.380
they would actually see the higher culture forms of sin as a higher form of a sin than
00:29:29.480
the lower culture forms of a sin, because there you are mixing.
00:29:32.980
And I've mentioned this in previous episode, one sin, which is just the general sin of doing
00:29:37.400
something not for God, but with the sin of pride.
00:29:40.740
And, and, you know, like you would get from an art museum or something like that.
00:29:43.880
But then you're also, in addition to that, doing something that's just like objectively
00:29:47.020
stupid, because now if you're engaging with high culture, you likely have something that's
00:29:55.640
You know, so there was a number of reasons that they felt this way.
00:29:57.800
But anyway, uh, in, in the Midlands area where the, where the Quakers controlled everything,
00:30:02.860
they were, they, they were the under, they didn't run any of the businesses.
00:30:07.040
They didn't run any of the politics, but in the areas that they fully controlled, it
00:30:10.600
was a different situation in the areas that they fully controlled.
00:30:13.680
You could get some like local sort of gang leaders who would end up ruling a district due
00:30:20.660
to like how many siblings they had and how much honor they had was in their culture.
00:30:25.100
But you wouldn't get tons of lawyers and teachers and doctors and competent politicians.
00:30:37.480
Well, it's the story of the Paxman boys points it out.
00:30:39.780
So they had come, they were besieging Philadelphia.
00:30:42.680
So these rural immigrant groups, like I'm mad at him.
00:30:44.720
What immigrant group in the United States is literally besieging with guns and having
00:30:52.460
These people were like a don't mess with me sort of thing.
00:30:54.620
So the guy who ended up bailing Philadelphia out because the Quakers had their heads up
00:30:59.380
their butts and couldn't handle anything was Puritan Ben Franklin.
00:31:03.800
So he ended up being able to make a negotiation with them that ended up saving the Quakers of
00:31:10.180
I think they couldn't defend themselves well either because they'd never really done the
00:31:15.100
And I should note that these people actually went to war with a number of the other settlements.
00:31:19.800
They also went to war with the Tidewater peoples.
00:31:22.260
These were the peoples who were the sons of the Cavaliers to the south, like around the
00:31:28.560
So they would regularly go to war against the other colonists when the other colonists would
00:31:33.420
So the Puritans actually worked very well with them.
00:31:36.300
Like these two cultures went together while the Quakers were sort of oil and water with
00:31:42.440
These people who were from a fundamentally different religious framework.
00:31:45.740
The Puritans were basically their religious framework.
00:31:55.800
Like they didn't like showing off their wealth so they could live in these communities safely.
00:32:00.180
Here I'd also note, if you remember earlier, I said that the Puritans would intentionally
00:32:04.660
build settlements in areas where it was hard to farm, either that were colder or that had
00:32:09.880
lots of rocks in the field because they liked intentionally opting into hardship, thinking that it sort of
00:32:15.760
purified their soul, they felt very comfortable moving into regions that anyone else would say
00:32:21.500
were dangerous or that you shouldn't move into this region.
00:32:24.440
You know, a Quaker might say, well, we shouldn't move out there because these people might kill us.
00:32:29.560
Whereas a Puritan would say, these people might kill us.
00:32:37.240
They like to put themselves in hard environments, which won them honor points among these people.
00:32:44.660
And so a number of the Puritans ended up migrating into these communities and forming this sort of like
00:32:52.520
learned elite roles, like the lawyers, the doctors, the entrepreneurs and stuff like that
00:32:58.880
within these communities enough so that they could get a bit of a society.
00:33:02.280
And here we should talk about what these societies ended up looking like.
00:33:06.460
They had a few different breakaway states at points, but the main one was the, I'll call it
00:33:11.820
So they had like a local martial role that was called a regulator.
00:33:16.140
And this individual would apply clan-like justice.
00:33:19.760
Well, actually, it was called lynching, named after a guy named Lynch.
00:33:23.300
For more color here, the term Lynch mob came after a man with the name Charles Lynch,
00:33:29.300
a Virginia planter and justice of the peace during the American Revolution.
00:33:32.960
Charles Lynch headed an irregular court that punished loyalists, and his actions gave rise
00:33:38.020
to the term Lynch's law, which referred to the extrajudicial punishment of individuals
00:33:45.080
Although there is a claim that William Lynch, another Virginia planter of the same era, was
00:33:50.560
It was a system of justice where when one person would do something bad, you would go into their
00:33:56.040
And that was what the regulators did to police their communities.
00:34:00.360
And they were needed to police their communities because the local governments were not policing
00:34:04.900
And they actually ended up, when the 13 colonies were sending all their delegates down, they
00:34:09.020
elected their own delegate to go down as a separate, you call it sort of shadow country,
00:34:14.940
because nobody else recognized them as a non-ruled over part of the United States, but they
00:34:21.300
Basically, separate colony was a separate legal system.
00:34:24.020
Okay, so for clarification here, the regulator movement had been put down before this event
00:34:31.180
This was sort of a successor government to them that was much less formal than the full
00:34:38.160
And for anyone looking for more information on this stuff, this is all covered in American
00:34:44.260
The core thing that I am discussing here that differs from what's accounted in American
00:34:48.260
nations is the integration of the Puritan culture into the backwoods culture, which he
00:34:55.360
So any thoughts on this before I go into what happened to the Puritans who didn't meld with
00:35:02.640
Okay, so the Puritans who meld with this culture, I'll talk a little about what happened to them
00:35:07.120
They began to adopt more of the ethical system that this culture had in its relationship to
00:35:12.820
So they stayed really, really obsessed with education, but they became a lot less obsessed
00:35:19.260
with technical correctness and consequentialism and everything like that and the elect and
00:35:25.940
But they became a lot less obsessed with, you have to follow every rule perfectly.
00:35:31.100
It was more of like, they began to, I guess, sort of understand, I would guess I'd call it
00:35:35.940
the party lifestyle of these people and the everything to an extreme lifestyle of these people.
00:35:41.840
And formed this sort of, I guess you could say, like, Braveheart-like cultural class.
00:35:46.140
Like you see in the Braveheart movie where they're like, well, we need some people in
00:35:48.640
this clan-based system to be extremely educated and know tons of languages and be obsessed
00:35:53.560
And that was sort of the role that they filled.
00:35:57.420
If you've ever read about the Free State of Jones movement?
00:36:00.360
One of the 15 of my ancestors who was involved and had the most senior position was in the
00:36:06.480
He's actually the reason why we know about the movement to begin with, because he wrote the
00:36:11.940
Also, as a quick addition here, because I had forgot this, but I was just double-checking
00:36:15.960
this information, that Jasper named his first son Ulysses Sherman Collins.
00:36:22.300
You got to understand, in the Antebellum South, naming your first son Ulysses Sherman College
00:36:27.360
today would be like naming your kid Hitler Mao Collins.
00:36:31.600
But he's the guy in the movie who's always doing stuff like trying to write a constitution
00:36:35.020
for them and trying to write a set of laws and trying to write philosophical treaties
00:36:40.640
Now, obviously, a lot of the people in this were related to my family, but that was like
00:36:43.080
the patriarch of that local region, who was Jasper Collins, was who it was.
00:36:47.940
Because that was what they did with these people.
00:36:51.020
And they'd be like, hey, guys, guys, guys, I got a legal system that we can use.
00:36:54.940
And I got these like religious arguments for why we're doing this.
00:37:00.080
Um, these communities, um, they, they were never like leader leader, but they were the
00:37:07.240
leader's guy who helped the leader actually get shit done.
00:37:10.120
And they were okay with that because to take the leadership position in a way would be a
00:37:13.260
sign of sin because that would just show you wanted power for yourself.
00:37:15.440
And so it worked very, very well with these two cultures work together.
00:37:19.080
Even today, I've noted that people from the Puritan cultural class work really well with
00:37:26.180
And I think that this often surprises people from coastal cities where they're like, oh,
00:37:32.040
the, the backwoods people would see nothing in common with you.
00:37:37.160
And I think that this shows a misunderstanding of the way the backwood culture works now or
00:37:43.360
Remember the backwoods people were the first ones to pick up like Indian ways of doing things
00:37:48.160
They don't have a lot of prejudice against people of different cultural practices or really
00:37:57.060
They're more just concerned about being able to get by and live their life and support their
00:38:02.680
family and then their wider network and not being looked down upon.
00:38:07.480
Issues about like cultural purity and stuff like that are not really important to them,
00:38:13.480
except when it feels to them that another cultural clan is encroaching on their territory.
00:38:18.260
And then to the Puritans, there's never really been a high amount of class judgment of people
00:38:23.460
outside the Puritan network within Puritan groups.
00:38:26.940
So I think, you know, some people here are like, oh, you'd never get along with like an
00:38:31.840
Somebody said this after one of our other videos.
00:38:33.780
And I'm like, you know that like the people who care for our kids every day and who we're
00:38:39.480
in business with, like the core people we're in business with are, you know, face tattoos
00:38:47.220
Like the, we get along very well with average Americans and average Americans, at least
00:38:52.660
of this Appalachian cultural group, get along very well with us because we're just not very
00:38:59.140
And I've actually noticed they get along uniquely well from us in the Pennsylvania area when
00:39:05.580
And I think the core reason is that in Pennsylvania, the upper class people in Pennsylvania really look
00:39:12.240
down on middle-class Pennsylvanians and like lower middle-class Pennsylvanians and in Texas
00:39:21.500
Like George Bush, for example, clearly didn't look down on middle-class Americans in the
00:39:26.580
same way I see people in like the main line do.
00:39:37.800
Do you have any thoughts before I want to go further, someone?
00:39:42.240
So, reason number one, and by far, far, far the biggest reason, the Catholic immigrant
00:39:49.020
They were mostly just displaced by the Catholics.
00:39:51.560
And when I say displaced, I mean displaced, not like killed or replaced.
00:39:56.720
Specifically, they migrated out to either the backwoods regions or the West or, you know,
00:40:05.600
There were a lot of places that they migrated to around the frontier areas.
00:40:09.640
But they mostly just kept moving to wherever was one of the hardest places to live in America
00:40:15.140
because that was part of their culture was to seek out intentional hardship and not have
00:40:21.180
any aspersion that they may be benefiting from any form of nepotism or family reputation.
00:40:27.800
I mean, my family has actually done this for a few generations where almost everyone in
00:40:31.140
my family has started their first company in another country.
00:40:34.240
Like, you consider me, I got my first big job in Korea and then the first company that
00:40:41.240
And now I feel comfortable working in the U.S. because, you know, I've sort of proven that
00:40:48.120
But that was a really important thing was in this Puritan cultural group.
00:40:52.300
But it also meant that it was very natural for them to be displaced.
00:40:56.340
What I mean by that is it didn't require much of a push or much of a culture change to get
00:41:02.700
them to leave their previous cultural strongholds like Boston.
00:41:05.860
I mean, if you look in like it's recently in 2009, for example, the Puritan stronghold was
00:41:11.580
Yet in 2009, over 50 percent of Massachusetts was still Catholic.
00:41:17.540
Like, how much do you think was Puritan descendants?
00:41:20.780
Yeah, a lot of Americans, 13 percent or so were descendants from the Mayflower, but they
00:41:25.400
So the independent Puritan cultural clusters just mostly died or became narrower and narrower
00:41:33.140
in focus and more and more like out there cultish regions.
00:41:38.100
Like this is where you had like the Kellogg's and stuff like that, where they would have
00:41:47.420
Because I think a lot of people misunderstand the Puritans because the Quakers basically
00:41:51.220
historically went and whitewash history and pretended the Puritans were the Quakers and
00:41:54.340
the Quakers were the Puritans because they weren't.
00:41:57.440
They were so pro-sex that I'll be in seeded even talks about this.
00:42:00.780
Their writings were not de-censored until the 20th century.
00:42:04.460
They just were extremely strict about when you could have sex and when you couldn't have
00:42:08.660
They were sex positive within marriage, we'll say.
00:42:17.000
Like they would never go anywhere without running.
00:42:19.260
They would, you know, the people would come in and be like, they were always rocking in
00:42:24.360
They were like full of energy about life and about everything.
00:42:28.740
Just 120% about absolutely everything in every conceivable way.
00:42:38.780
They were also very about sort of intellectual stoicism and a performative intellectual stoicism.
00:42:46.540
And this performative intellectual stoicism is another thing that ended up killing them.
00:42:50.460
They had an internal cultural hierarchy that was in part based on being able to show you
00:42:58.020
And this, in a way, creates a form of inverse humility where they would do these ridiculous,
00:43:03.780
I'll put on a skit here with some people doing this so you can see like what it ended up
00:43:13.420
Oh, look at how crazy humble this thing I just did was.
00:43:15.500
Those who caught when the sun descends caught the devil's design for certain.
00:43:29.060
The pain purifies my predilection for pleasure.
00:43:32.000
Your alliteration sounds dangerously like poetry.
00:43:39.460
Now, obviously, this is a comedy sketch and not reality.
00:43:42.600
But I think it shows why you cannot have a whole community dedicated to a dominance hierarchy
00:43:52.700
Because when the entire dominance hierarchy is based around humility and austerity, people
00:43:58.840
But if you mix these people with another group that isn't dedicated to a dominance hierarchy
00:44:03.520
around humility and austerity, then they don't have the same feedback cycle.
00:44:08.320
They can just be like, ah, well, you know, I'm more humble than the average person in
00:44:14.100
And they don't spiral out of control and go extinct.
00:44:16.860
Like, obviously, if you grow up in a culture like this, you're probably not going to want
00:44:20.220
to continue it when there are other options around you.
00:44:23.080
Which is why the Puritans in the more mono-Puritan communities, like you had in New England, mostly
00:44:30.200
Also, it's important to note here that when the Catholic immigrants came into New England,
00:44:34.260
they did not mix with the Puritan communities much, in the same way that the Puritan communities
00:44:39.340
mixed with, like, the backwoods people and stuff like that.
00:44:42.160
These communities were much more oil and water.
00:44:44.960
And so there wasn't the ability, like, if you were a town that was half Catholic and
00:44:49.780
half Puritan, and you were a Puritan, 98% of your interactions would be with other Puritans.
00:44:56.660
Whereas if you were a town that was, you know, half Puritan, half backwater, about 50% of
00:45:02.620
your interactions would be with backwater people, 50% would be with Puritans.
00:45:05.940
There wasn't the same amount of antipathy between these two cultural groups or cultural
00:45:11.900
And a lot of people are like, when they look at the modern cultural groups and they go,
00:45:17.300
Who has, like, a performative cultural stoicism and is really pro-education?
00:45:23.680
You're looking at, like, the Jordan Petersons of today.
00:45:27.860
Whereas the wokest are the descendant culture of Quakers.
00:45:30.800
But there are some still, like, cultural descendants of these Puritans.
00:45:36.960
And another thing that was really unique about the Puritan communities was the way their religious
00:45:41.620
Where they set up, like, five churches in a town.
00:45:44.340
And then whichever one was, like, the most charismatic is the one that everyone would
00:45:51.100
Like, everyone would choose, like, which version.
00:45:52.800
But it meant that you would get, this is what we had with the Great Awakening, just like,
00:45:55.820
these incredibly religiously zelotic people in terms of, like, everything about their
00:46:02.520
life was basically, like, an influencer-based culture of religious charisma and extreme
00:46:13.880
Aggressive virtue signaling to a certain extent.
00:46:19.760
Now, we should talk about how the Puritans' virtue signal, because it's very different
00:46:23.420
The Quakers would virtue signal with, like, big displays.
00:46:26.360
Like, if they were anti-animal cruelty, they'd, like, throw themselves on the dog track and,
00:46:38.140
It was all, like, you weren't even really supposed to show, necessarily, how humble you
00:46:42.440
were being, because that could be seen as not being humble enough.
00:46:45.660
Very was in your culture, and very was in your towns.
00:46:48.360
You just didn't want bad things happening within your towns.
00:46:49.900
You didn't care about what the people outside your towns or outside your culture would do.
00:46:55.720
So the second thing that led to them dying out was this zealotry just...
00:47:00.560
As secularization began, it didn't do a good job of intergenerationally passing to
00:47:09.720
This can be all well and good for, you know, a few groups of, like, zealotic adults.
00:47:14.060
But if you're a kid growing up in one of these cultures, and the adult's like, well, you
00:47:17.500
should just be ultra-religion because it's, like, the coolest thing ever!
00:47:20.700
A lot of kids are like, yeah, but there's, like, easier ways I can do this, right?
00:47:27.400
And then when it really died out in the 1800s was the rise of the evangelical movement.
00:47:32.820
They did a very good job of converting out of these communities.
00:47:36.980
Well, because it was still very religiously extra.
00:47:39.880
It was still very high energy, but it was better, I think, at spreading.
00:47:51.360
It was a related message which could sell to these people, but it didn't have all of the rules.
00:47:57.760
And so the Puritans would join these communities, often keep the rules for one generation, but
00:48:01.940
then their kids would grow up without them, and they'd be like, look, this performative
00:48:06.860
No one else in my church congregation is doing it.
00:48:10.160
And so that ended up dropping that part of the Puritan movement.
00:48:15.360
Another thing to remember about the Puritan movement was the city-on-a-hill mindset, which
00:48:20.220
is we are all going to create a completely new way of creating society, and it will lead to
00:48:26.980
Very similar to how the Kibbutz movement died, this played into the Puritan movement.
00:48:31.300
So for people who don't know how the Kibbutz movement died, Kibbutzes were these sort of,
00:48:35.240
like, communist Jewish communes in Israel, and the thing that killed them was actually
00:48:43.100
Many of them turned out to be enormously wealthy in terms of the amount of revenue that they
00:48:48.180
were generating, to the point where when you got one or two generations in, the kids
00:48:53.240
were like, well, I mean, I could just leave with all of this money and then just join a
00:49:00.980
And that happened with many of the Puritan communities, is that they did, in a way, achieve
00:49:05.980
the city-on-the-hill dream, which was an enormous amount of wealth, but people who still lived
00:49:15.040
You know, as I pointed out, Scrooge didn't spend his wealth on himself.
00:49:18.300
He didn't spend it on things like charity that could be used to sign new virtue to other
00:49:25.040
But this doesn't end up looking like a city on a hill to outsiders or to an individual's
00:49:31.160
After a few generations, they're like, wait, wait, wait, so when does the utopia come?
00:49:37.240
But this did not affect the backwoods Puritan groups as much because they dropped the practice
00:49:43.560
of wealth accumulation altogether and focus much more on honor accumulation and information
00:49:50.180
accumulation in terms of intergenerational education.
00:49:53.640
For an example of what I mean by that, if you look at my ancestors, every single one of
00:49:58.820
my grandparents, both men and women, had a college degree, which is pretty rare for people
00:50:04.000
Another thing that really ended up killing the Puritan movement was, and this is another
00:50:08.800
thing that is hugely forgotten about the Puritan movement, is they were very, very, very pro
00:50:16.540
Like the very, remember I talked about like the multiple churches, like fighting for members
00:50:21.720
and somebody can be like that, that would lead to very interesting religious stuff.
00:50:25.700
Well, the scientific revolution was happening in this period.
00:50:28.680
And a lot of the Puritans, these are the people who tried to like harmonize their Bibles
00:50:33.380
with what was scientifically known at the time.
00:50:36.120
They were a mix of religious extremism, but also pro-science extremism, or at least some
00:50:44.300
This is something that's hugely forgotten about them in terms of the modern stereotype of the
00:50:52.000
They can almost be thought of as antithetical to Amish, where they tried to adapt all of
00:50:57.820
the latest technologies and all of the latest scientific perspectives in the most extreme
00:51:04.800
Actually, I remember a story about one of my ancestors from this group who lived not far
00:51:09.440
from us here in Pennsylvania, and he built his house so that when you would ride the
00:51:14.800
carriage up to it, there was a plate underneath the front of it, and the plate led to a weight
00:51:20.400
system that would automatically open the doors.
00:51:23.340
And apparently his entire house was full of automated gadgets like this.
00:51:27.480
And this is captured in the Puritan spotting checklist that Scott Alexander did, plus one
00:51:32.960
for a weird classical name, plus three if they have one of these names themselves, extra
00:51:40.200
points if they have an invention, max plus three, at least one, plus three points for one eccentric
00:51:46.500
invention, plus one point if they created anything they gave a classical name to, plus three points
00:51:51.860
if they have achievements in multiple unrelated fields.
00:51:53.900
And that was really important in this Puritan culture, is academic perfection in multiple
00:51:59.540
Plus one, atheist, deist, or free thinker, which is interesting that you would associate that
00:52:03.360
with Puritan, but it really was associated with these communities.
00:52:05.680
They combined sort of an atheism with religiosity.
00:52:08.460
As you could say, obviously, we're culturally descendant of this.
00:52:12.740
Plus three, wrote a book about their heterodox religious views.
00:52:26.280
Plus three, in college society with a classical name.
00:52:36.740
Plus three, had plans to emanestize the eschaton.
00:52:41.240
Plus three, if they raged a crusade on an abstract concept.
00:52:44.480
Plus three, if they had ideas that were utopian yet racist.
00:52:47.140
Plus three, if they were inspired by the wisdom of the Far East.
00:52:53.140
Plus one, if they fought for African-American rights in some way.
00:52:56.180
Plus three, if they were famous for philanthropy.
00:52:59.680
Plus three, for rabidly anti-war, yet rabidly supported every specific war that happened.
00:53:05.480
And I feel personally attacked by that last one.
00:53:08.240
We're all like, yeah, I'm against war more broadly, but this war just has to be fought.
00:53:12.800
But, so their flirtation with science led them to, even before the wave of Jews who deconverted
00:53:21.380
due to secularization, have a huge deconversion wave due to secularization, when science began
00:53:31.500
Because in these early waves of like the early waves of Darwinism and stuff like that, it
00:53:36.860
They were trying to find ways to make it more compatible with the older interpretations
00:53:40.980
And they just couldn't, and that ended up pushing away a lot of their kids as well.
00:53:44.960
Because the education aspect and the search for truth aspect, which was a huge part of
00:53:49.880
their culture, ended up mattering more to them than the tradition and the religious aspect.
00:53:55.360
Because you haven't talked much of this stuff soon.
00:53:58.140
Is it so terrible for me to love the sound of your voice?
00:54:05.360
Yeah, and I've always found it so absolutely bizarre, this idea that Yankee culture came
00:54:11.420
from Puritan culture, when part of it kind of did, I guess I would say.
00:54:16.860
There are pockets of the old Puritan culture still in New England.
00:54:20.440
And I think you see this in things like the Free State Movement.
00:54:23.160
But definitely not in the governments we have in places like Massachusetts and stuff like
00:54:26.620
that, which are really heavily Catholic influenced.
00:54:28.960
And even the Free State Movement is still like, you know, the state is still heavily
00:54:36.380
Oh, also, we can talk about why the Catholics didn't end up moving to the backwoods areas.
00:54:40.520
I can also just add, just as a general to add context, Albion Seed was written to talk
00:54:45.740
about how four foundational waves of immigration from England to the United States had a still
00:54:55.200
And I think what drove the creation of the book American Nations was that it's not enough
00:55:05.140
And I think the broader point that you're making here is that pretty much every cultural
00:55:10.300
group that spends a non-trivial amount of time in an area with a certain critical mass
00:55:15.220
is going to have a permanent and lasting effect on the culture and governance.
00:55:23.740
No, I'm arguing that some specific cultures had a huge lasting impact.
00:55:29.480
For example, the Asian immigration ways really didn't impact culture that much anywhere that
00:55:35.820
They didn't integrate with the mainstream society as much and as much their culture didn't
00:55:40.160
really change the cultural tones of those areas.
00:55:50.820
It's based on the time of period they came there, what organizations they were interacting
00:55:56.780
Like the key reason why the Catholics ended up affecting the regions they were in so much
00:56:01.640
was their propensity towards engaging with local bureaucracies.
00:56:04.800
And that is why they ended up affecting things so heavily, way more heavily.
00:56:09.860
So if we're looking at people building their intergenerationally durable cultures and they
00:56:14.300
want to build one that as humans go off planet, form new colonies on new planets and on spaceships,
00:56:20.240
they want to be the ones that actually set the tone.
00:56:23.280
What should they be designing or what should they be looking at?
00:56:26.000
Basically, you're saying you should be there at the foundation, at the creation of governance
00:56:31.520
What other factors make a culture have this impact?
00:56:34.220
Why, and this is actually a core thing, why did the Catholics wipe out the Puritans, but
00:56:40.040
they didn't wipe out the backwoods people in terms of their cultural footprint?
00:56:44.860
And the answer is because the backwoods people were in regions the Catholics could not safely
00:56:51.640
So the Puritans, once you had cleared all the stones off these initial fields that were
00:56:57.360
hard to work and everything like that, and turned these areas into prosperous areas with
00:57:02.360
big local governments and everything like that, and the Catholic immigration waves came
00:57:06.420
in, and they were really good at bureaucracies that we talked about in our other video on
00:57:11.580
this, they really integrated with the local bureaucracy.
00:57:14.680
They had an easy time settling and not moving into these areas.
00:57:17.720
If you told them to move to these backwood areas, they'd be like, what do you mean?
00:57:21.160
We're like, the Indian clan people war is going on.
00:57:28.120
I'm not going to put my family at that kind of risk.
00:57:30.380
The reason why they didn't move into these areas was because they were incredibly dangerous
00:57:37.000
And that is something that helps preserve your culture.
00:57:40.000
What fundamentally protected their culture, while all of the three other founding cultures,
00:57:44.920
the Cavaliers, the Quakers, and the Puritans all died out, is because they settled in regions
00:57:58.020
And this is what I would take away from the backwoods people.
00:58:00.800
There is a huge cultural value in attempting to settle cultural niches where other people
00:58:07.120
don't want to live, or people without your value system are going to not want to live.
00:58:11.880
Um, you know, for them, it was in part because they were settling on poorer land, but it was
00:58:17.140
in part because they were settling on, they themselves created the hazard of those regions.
00:58:23.640
It was incredibly dangerous to move to those regions if you weren't from one of their cultures.
00:58:27.620
And even if you were from one of their cultures, it was kind of dangerous to live in their regions.
00:58:32.180
I've tried to keep this PG, mostly, but when I say dangerous, you shouldn't misunderstand this as
00:58:41.740
For example, if you moved to one of these regions, and you had a daughter, and you could not
00:58:48.960
protect your homestead, the clans around would just come and take her.
00:58:53.820
That was a common thing that happened in these regions.
00:58:56.720
And if you couldn't support a blood feud to get her back, then you couldn't really exercise
00:59:03.440
So we are talking about a form of violence and clan mentality that goes beyond what you
00:59:11.440
might be thinking if your reference point is modern day gang warfare, instead of, oh,
00:59:17.320
the neighbors over there have a nice property, should we take it?
00:59:20.500
Well, they're newcomers, they don't have any friends in the region, and their property isn't
00:59:24.520
really heavily defended, so yeah, we can probably kill them.
00:59:29.740
And I also say this because people are like, oh, Malcolm, you're so biased against groups
00:59:34.080
that you aren't descended from, so I need to make sure to present my own group as honestly
00:59:39.220
as possible, because that was very different from the other American groups.
00:59:44.080
Also, this is the final thought I wanted to have before we wrap things up here, is I think
00:59:49.320
people, when they see you and I raising our kids, as most people who really came from these
00:59:56.320
backwoods, you know, you came from like Old Woodland Sheriff family, basically, you know,
01:00:01.180
did they expect our kids, like this large family we're having, to be like these large Mormon
01:00:06.600
You know, they see all these orderly little kids line up, and that's not what they're going
01:00:10.160
Like, if you saw a video of our kids in our house, as you've put it, like the closest thing,
01:00:15.620
because a lot of a person's disposition is heritable.
01:00:19.520
I'm going to play a quick diatribe by Octavian.
01:00:22.040
It's pretty obvious he didn't pick these ideas up from anything that Simone and I are
01:00:27.060
saying, and I think it's also pretty obvious that he didn't pick up these ideas from children's
01:00:31.700
So this is probably just a baked-in genetic code that's within both of us that's sort
01:00:48.480
I hope I can catch all the families in those buckets.
01:00:55.060
I just want the lobsters to die and the families, too.
01:01:00.160
Wait, you want the lobsters and their families to die?
01:01:03.360
Wait, so you let them go so that they could go to their families, and then we could find
01:01:21.480
Sometimes, if you're a lot bigger than something, it doesn't matter that it hurt you.
01:01:25.580
You just have to say it's not as smart as you, so it's okay.
01:01:29.460
Is that okay if I catch all the family and the kids?
01:01:37.320
And then what are you going to do if you catch the family and the kids?
01:01:50.160
Well, if I don't, I want to destroy all lobsters, not fish.
01:02:24.160
So you were driving my car one day, and a lobster attacked you?
01:02:35.380
And I caught my computer, and they didn't know it for me.
01:02:42.120
But I'm like, this is something to kill to lobsters.
01:02:51.580
This is actually a really fascinating diatribe to sort of break down,
01:02:56.260
because I think it gives a good eye into the way these types of people thought about things.
01:03:02.220
If you note, he divides the world into things that might hurt him and things that might not hurt him.
01:03:11.280
Lobsters are in the category that might hurt him.
01:03:15.940
And they must die, and their kids must die, and their families and friends must die.
01:03:20.200
And then also, when I try to be like, well, but I don't think any of them have hurt you specifically,
01:03:28.400
Obviously, he wasn't driving my car by himself,
01:03:30.920
so I'm pretty sure Lobster did not attack him while he was in the car,
01:03:38.160
And I think that this was probably fairly common in the backwood regions at this time.
01:03:42.300
They categorized different groups they were interacting with as the type of people that might hurt them,
01:03:47.040
in the type of people that might not hurt them, and they're good guys if they might not hurt them,
01:03:52.660
But they're everyone they've ever met if they're the type of person who might hurt them.
01:03:55.980
So, in part, this is just a hereditable part of our kids, but in part, it's because of how we raise our kids.
01:04:00.860
The way that these people historically raise their kids, and the way that I was taught to raise my kids,
01:04:05.520
is our goal is to stoke the fire of ambition and life within them as much as possible.
01:04:13.100
You know, you see this in the song, He's Mine, which I'll play some clips of here.
01:04:18.180
But in it, he comes from this cultural group as well.
01:04:33.760
It's a country song where he's proud of his kid for violating rules and pushing boundaries.
01:04:41.320
Like, the kid gets taught, you know, shooting bottles down in a holler,
01:04:44.520
and then he brings over, and he's like, he's mine, like, he's so proud that his kid was the one who broke the rules.
01:04:50.300
Our kids still get punished, but we're proud of them for breaking rules.
01:04:52.700
And that's part of why we do the punishment in the way we do, right?
01:04:56.020
And, you know, later in the song, the reason why, it's showing why do you have this?
01:04:59.220
I'd also note that this is where this cultural group is quite different than, like, say, the Andrew Tate cultural group.
01:05:17.200
Because something that was always made very clear to me growing up and is repeated in this song
01:05:21.980
is the honor comes from the fact that he is both standing up to the system,
01:05:26.280
but also challenging and winning against somebody who is larger and stronger than he is.
01:05:32.460
There isn't any honor in just being stronger than someone and beating up or fighting somebody who is weaker than you.
01:05:39.920
The second point is the song also here in the next line I'm going to show makes the point of why do you do this?
01:05:45.200
Why do you encourage rebellion even when it's against you?
01:05:49.460
And it's because you can't turn rebellion on and off.
01:05:52.160
If you have this rebellious stand-up-to-authority mindset, you need to always encourage it.
01:05:58.260
You can't hope that the kid's just able to turn it on and off whenever they feel like it.
01:06:06.560
Because then, when the authority and everyone else is saying you shouldn't do something,
01:06:10.320
and, you know, a big kid's picking on a little kid, you know he's going to be the first to stand up for that little kid.
01:06:14.440
Because he understands, like, this cultural consequentialism.
01:06:17.040
And I've actually seen this from you, Simone, in a few things you do in terms of raising our kids.
01:06:23.580
And your lesson to him was he got punished because he got caught.
01:06:30.320
Another instance of this happening recently was she told Octavian to stay in bed,
01:06:35.220
or he wouldn't get, I don't know, some treat or something like that.
01:06:38.140
And then she could see on the camera that he was running all around.
01:06:40.640
But when she came downstairs, he was back in bed.
01:06:43.880
And he asked her, mischievous, he's like, I've been staying in bed, right?
01:06:49.300
And she's like, no, I didn't see you out of bed.
01:06:51.620
As she said to me, if he grows up thinking that people don't lie and society doesn't lie,
01:06:56.460
and that's not the way that he relates to the world,
01:07:00.980
he's going to get absolutely gooned on by society.
01:07:04.780
Actually, we have some friends who have this rule of never, ever lying to their children.
01:07:08.080
And she's like, oh my God, those kids are going to end up being so taken advantage of
01:07:18.060
And this is the thing about the way different cultures relate to their kids.
01:07:21.440
She would see learning to never, ever deceive authority,
01:07:26.240
or learning that authority will never deceive you,
01:07:32.360
the relationship between a kid and their parents are sacred.
01:07:35.140
And they don't understand that this is a cultural take, not an absolutist take.
01:07:39.400
That is such a backwoods, like ethical style for a kid.
01:07:44.420
Or my mom, you know, when I told on a kid at school and she goes,
01:07:50.400
I was like, well, the kid was, you know, picking on another kid.
01:07:58.600
Well, so our kids will get in fights over toys.
01:08:00.940
And Simone will go up to them and tell the big one,
01:08:04.420
you need to wait until he gets bored of the toy and then snatch it from him
01:08:14.380
He's like, I want the thing that my little brother has.
01:08:20.120
And so then he'll like, go get another toy and like pretend.
01:08:24.500
And then the younger sibling will get tired of playing with the toy,
01:08:30.000
And Octavian will come up to me with that toy and be like,
01:08:35.080
But not only that, so you've got these like Mormon families
01:08:39.220
where all these kids like follow the rules and everything like that.
01:08:41.660
And then this one depiction of a Mormon family,
01:08:43.460
I think it's much more similar to like my childhood
01:08:45.120
and much more similar to this backcountry style,
01:08:56.100
he'll like climb behind me here and start kicking me in the face
01:08:59.300
or try to climb on top of me while I'm doing something
01:09:04.140
and their favorite thing is being like punched and thrown.
01:09:07.920
And this is also why, like, I don't, like, I thought the bot thing was so weird
01:09:33.120
because I'm like, I hurt my kid so much more than that in things that are recreational for them
01:09:45.940
I mean, but we do a lot of like punching and stuff.
01:09:48.940
Yeah, there's a lot more rough and tumble going on in terms of fun.
01:09:52.940
But that's, I mean, that is how pain works, right?
01:09:55.700
You know, if you're being whipped by a schoolteacher nun
01:10:03.440
and yet then you're being whipped by a partner in like a BDSM scenario,
01:10:07.560
the same exact impact on your body using the same exact tool
01:10:13.280
can feel very different depending on the context.
01:10:19.040
and this is another interesting thing that we do as parenting,
01:10:20.920
which I think is really different from the other influencer families,
01:10:23.880
is we have like strict rules against ever punishing our kids
01:10:29.780
And I think that a lot of parents, like, they can be like,
01:10:36.380
A kid's just being too loud or running around too much.
01:10:42.140
And I remember growing up, like, never do that to a kid.
01:10:44.660
Never get a kid to calm down because our goal in parents
01:10:47.680
is to throw wood on that fire of excitement for life
01:10:55.940
we don't punish them ever for being too excited
01:11:06.120
wow, these are very different from other influencer kids.
01:11:10.340
Actually, it reminds me, I'll post the pictures.
01:11:13.120
because the kids are in their underwear in the pictures.
01:11:17.100
where Simone said goodnight to the baby in the crib.
01:11:25.580
Well, then all the kids get immediately extremely hyper.
01:11:41.480
They're all like jumping and pushing each other.
01:11:44.260
They've entered like a cage match in the baby's room.
01:11:57.820
This actually reminds you of this really funny thing
01:12:24.300
and he's not from one of these clan-based cultures.
01:12:26.200
He's actually from a Catholic family historically.
01:12:34.640
because this little like five and four-year-old
01:12:41.920
And in the way a five or four-year-old would like,
01:12:56.240
And so they'd just try to like tackle him down.
01:13:16.120
But you know, I'm proud of them for their energy
01:13:28.420
but I don't think he felt like genuinely picked on,
01:15:39.880
they know that they've caused more pain for you