Based Camp - August 09, 2024


America's Lost Tribe: The Puritans & Greater Appalachia's Role In Their Disappearance


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 24 minutes

Words per Minute

182.3767

Word Count

15,496

Sentence Count

968

Misogynist Sentences

15

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.
00:00:11.640 American Nations by Colin Woodard,
00:00:14.040 which was inspired by one of our favorite books of all time,
00:00:17.400 Albion Seed by David Hackett Fitcher.
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.
00:00:27.040 And in the last episode we did on this, which you can check out,
00:00:29.480 one of the core things I think he got wrong
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
00:00:43.140 or the Northeastern coastal culture in the United States,
00:00:46.340 where we argue this is fundamentally wrong-headed,
00:00:49.760 that that culture actually stems from Catholicism,
00:00:53.320 which for a long time made up the majority population in these regions
00:00:56.940 after the immigration waves started,
00:00:59.060 so even though, just to briefly cover some concepts from the last one
00:01:03.200 that a lot of people are unfamiliar with,
00:01:04.800 Catholics at the time of America's founding were an incredibly small part of the colonies.
00:01:07.840 They were like 1.5%.
00:01:09.120 Even in the quote-unquote Catholic colony,
00:01:11.680 they were a very small minority, around 10%.
00:01:14.660 That was Maryland.
00:01:15.740 So they just were not a big cultural force in America
00:01:18.700 until the Irish, Italian, and now Hispanic immigration waves,
00:01:23.840 which led to the Catholic population becoming the predominant cultural wellspring
00:01:29.640 of three of the American cultural groups.
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,
00:01:43.620 and the far-left cultural group that is on the west coast.
00:01:48.580 And if I put a map here of America's districts by primary religious affiliation,
00:01:54.880 you will see there is a huge overlap with all the blue strongholds
00:01:58.000 and where the Catholics were settled.
00:02:00.540 So now we want to go, or at least these specific blue strongholds,
00:02:04.680 i.e. Yankee-dom and far-left-dom,
00:02:07.160 the far west coast of the United States.
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.
00:02:17.640 Is, okay, these are the four cultures that form the foundation of America.
00:02:21.860 Where did they go?
00:02:23.500 Right.
00:02:24.160 Where did the Quakers go?
00:02:25.760 Where did the Puritans go?
00:02:28.180 Where did the Cavaliers go?
00:02:31.080 Because the Backwoods people, which I'm descended from, the greater Apple.
00:02:34.080 We know where they are.
00:02:35.140 They're right where you think they are.
00:02:36.780 We will, in this episode, talk about this culture and its background.
00:02:41.140 But I think a lot of people are a bit mystified about what happened to these three other.
00:02:45.240 It's kind of cool in American history, by the way, if you like study it.
00:02:48.740 It's like the Lost Tribes.
00:02:50.260 It's like, well, there are really unique founding groups in the country.
00:02:54.500 Where did they go?
00:02:55.960 How did they end up actually influencing the cultures that came downstream of them?
00:03:00.440 And a big answer here is they mostly died out.
00:03:05.100 Would you like to know more?
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,
00:03:24.440 because there were two big groups here, which I think is really undersold.
00:03:29.520 The Backwoods people, the Backwoods group, the greater Appalachian group,
00:03:33.520 was heavily related to the Puritan group.
00:03:36.480 They were also a Calvinist group.
00:03:38.340 They generally got along with the Puritan group.
00:03:41.120 And they ended up, actually, here's a great example of how well they got along with the Puritan group.
00:03:45.060 So there was something called the Paxton Boys uprising.
00:03:49.140 And in it, because the Quakers always trying to bureaucratically control everything,
00:03:54.440 were giving their districts like half the vote that the Quaker districts had,
00:03:58.320 the more central urban districts had.
00:04:00.880 And they also had created a situation in which the Indians were constantly attacking
00:04:04.500 and killing these people.
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,
00:04:13.220 which is just like mis-stories.
00:04:15.860 So it was actually around this, the time of the Paxton Boys,
00:04:18.460 like leading up to this, that the famous giving Indians smallpox infected blankets thing came from.
00:04:23.760 And people are like, oh, oh, that's so horrible.
00:04:27.680 How could anyone have done that?
00:04:29.100 And it's like, you know, they had just killed over 2,000 settlers and were besieging a settlement.
00:04:35.300 And that was the context.
00:04:37.560 Like, excuse me.
00:04:39.600 They had been butchering children.
00:04:41.600 Like what?
00:04:42.320 Like they were trying to save a settlement that was under siege.
00:04:46.140 This is like an Alamo situation here, people.
00:04:48.940 Like, is it bad, like by modern warfare standards?
00:04:54.180 Yeah.
00:04:55.200 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,
00:05:12.040 but it's run by Quakers.
00:05:13.740 And Quakers are pacifists.
00:05:15.120 I mean, yeah, I kind of have, like, with all things in life right now,
00:05:19.120 a fuck around and find out attitude.
00:05:21.360 Like, I mean, also, you siege a town.
00:05:24.640 They're going to try some stuff.
00:05:26.820 Like maybe they didn't expect biological warfare.
00:05:29.480 Does that mean it's unfair?
00:05:30.940 I don't know.
00:05:32.240 Yeah.
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,
00:05:38.740 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.
00:05:48.840 Yeah, I think many American cultural groups saw them as equal to the Native American,
00:05:54.720 the indigenous populations,
00:05:55.840 because they were equally brutal in some of their behaviors vis-a-vis other groups.
00:06:02.960 So we'll get to that.
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.
00:06:11.380 Or you could really say the first wave of people who felt like European immigrants in America.
00:06:16.600 I don't know.
00:06:17.020 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.
00:06:26.120 So not quite.
00:06:27.440 I need to clarify what I mean by second wave.
00:06:29.540 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.
00:06:41.720 Yes, the Cavaliers came as a separate wave, but they were mostly setting up...
00:06:45.020 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,
00:07:00.960 there wasn't a big existing settlement there.
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.
00:07:10.660 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.
00:07:30.340 Now, this was due to two reasons.
00:07:33.320 There wasn't yet this idea that America was, like, this mixing pot yet.
00:07:36.800 It was like, who are these brutal savages?
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,
00:08:01.780 they'd have, the law was the law.
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.
00:08:23.260 Like, our children come to us, Toasty did it.
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-
00:08:37.120 Roving vigilante groups.
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.
00:08:52.220 And they kind of were.
00:08:52.980 And loose women, and the women had higher skirts, low bust lines.
00:08:58.080 They all acted in a very informal way.
00:09:00.140 They just felt culturally extremely different.
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.
00:09:14.180 They were fleeing regional violence.
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,
00:09:24.740 oh, just go to the land outside the cities.
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
00:10:05.080 nothing about it.
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
00:10:19.540 like this.
00:10:20.160 It is so insane that you're refusing to do anything.
00:10:23.900 So anyway.
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.
00:10:32.840 One is, is they were very hardy people.
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
00:10:50.680 to give yourself hardship.
00:10:53.160 And the Puritans, keep in mind, settled in the northeast of the United States at a time
00:10:58.100 when it was much colder.
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.
00:11:14.100 It wasn't just the soil.
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
00:11:28.080 the Indians.
00:11:28.700 Now, it caused problems, and this is one of the things, where the Quakers, the Quakers
00:11:32.360 are just so slimy.
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
00:11:42.380 anti-slavery.
00:11:43.020 They had higher slave ownership rates than aristocratic southerners during the slave-owning
00:11:46.800 period.
00:11:47.520 They were very woke.
00:11:49.180 It was like, we'll say something's bad, but then, you know, in our actions, we'll cause
00:11:53.020 more damage.
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
00:12:14.040 killing them.
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.
00:12:31.320 Lord Almighty.
00:12:32.340 Okay.
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.
00:12:59.760 And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
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.
00:13:27.240 They would frequently marry Indians.
00:13:29.060 They would adopt Indian-style of dresses.
00:13:32.000 They would adopt...
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.
00:13:43.560 Yeah, they did.
00:13:44.300 Well, and was in Backwoods 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.
00:13:52.660 Like, they would just...
00:13:53.260 Well, they weren't that terribly different.
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.
00:14:03.620 They could...
00:14:04.960 They lived in rougher ways.
00:14:07.140 They were a clan-based people.
00:14:09.700 And in that, they were similar, but they were culturally quite different.
00:14:14.140 Well, culturally very different.
00:14:16.040 But sometimes I feel like lifestyle and culture...
00:14:20.700 I can tell how different they were.
00:14:21.940 Because I can see this idea of,
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.
00:14:33.420 People saw this intention to be like,
00:14:35.760 oh, they must have been similar culturally.
00:14:38.060 No, they were not at all similar culturally.
00:14:40.720 Not culturally, but logistically.
00:14:42.140 They were no more similar to the Indians than they were to the Quakers,
00:14:45.060 or the Quakers were to the Indians.
00:14:46.460 The only way, the only one dimension they were similar to the Indians
00:14:50.600 was that they were from a clan-based system.
00:14:52.760 They had different clans similar to the Indians,
00:14:54.980 and these clans fought each other.
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.
00:15:18.580 So in a way, they respected the Indians.
00:15:21.780 They wanted to learn from them.
00:15:22.660 They wanted to learn from their culture.
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.
00:15:38.580 I mean, they raid other clan settlements.
00:15:40.580 Why not raid the Indian settlements?
00:15:41.740 We're only treating them with the same respect that we treat our own.
00:15:44.940 Yeah, we're going and take their territory.
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,
00:16:06.820 for example.
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.
00:16:17.160 Anyway, so, and this was actually the group.
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,
00:16:27.300 like to try to be like enforcers.
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,
00:16:37.080 I guess you could say, people to move there.
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.
00:16:46.480 They can learn from them.
00:16:47.720 They can learn what, like of the people who are different from us,
00:16:54.020 what can we learn from them?
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.
00:17:32.020 We should all be able to compete.
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
00:17:53.420 own culture.
00:17:54.060 They can't fix anything themselves.
00:17:55.520 And I also believe this free competition mindset, I hold it because I believe it helps even the
00:18:01.220 groups that are in harder positions.
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
00:18:16.180 white income levels and closer to white IQs.
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,
00:18:31.360 right?
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.
00:18:52.320 Absolutely.
00:18:53.300 Did you have anything else you wanted to say about this community before I move further?
00:18:57.140 No, let's go for it.
00:18:58.580 So with this community, we can get to a...
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.
00:19:21.860 They were mostly formed of three groups, okay?
00:19:25.780 You had some of these backwoods people.
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.
00:19:39.700 They basically ran, well, everything.
00:19:42.580 They ran all of the major businesses.
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.
00:19:56.720 They didn't really protect them.
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.
00:20:03.380 It's the Amish.
00:20:04.160 But they didn't all become Amish.
00:20:05.580 This was one part of this faction, but it's still the most culturally preserved of this original
00:20:09.780 faction.
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.
00:20:26.920 It wasn't part of their culture.
00:20:28.740 They didn't believe in higher education in the way any of the other cultures did, so they
00:20:33.480 couldn't run these types of jobs.
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.
00:20:45.940 Well, because they...
00:20:47.380 So let's talk about how the Puritan, in their view of capital accumulation, created modern
00:20:50.900 capitalism.
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.
00:21:20.500 Well, keep in mind what success meant.
00:21:22.860 Okay, so they agreed with the Puritans on that.
00:21:25.060 God gives you success if he likes you.
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
00:21:37.260 come and steal it.
00:21:38.400 You know, if you got a bunch of cows and your neighbors would come and steal those cows,
00:21:41.980 there was no point in ever having stuff.
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.
00:22:05.980 And he was like, why was that?
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,
00:22:14.840 you know, because they were against slavery.
00:22:17.080 And we'll talk about why they were against slavery.
00:22:18.500 Because most of the Backwoods people weren't.
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
00:22:31.080 of the Free State of Jones.
00:22:32.300 You, me, all of us.
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.
00:22:38.460 Girls, you know how to shoot one of these?
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.
00:22:56.080 So anyway, where was it?
00:22:57.780 Capital accumulation.
00:22:59.140 Capital accumulation, yes.
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
00:23:11.100 like you would have in a Puritan setting.
00:23:12.820 It was Klan honor accumulation.
00:23:15.720 Yes.
00:23:16.440 Honor culture.
00:23:17.820 It was honor culture.
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.
00:23:28.140 There wasn't really so much capital.
00:23:29.740 There wasn't really so much of an economy.
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
00:23:42.580 power.
00:23:43.160 So it did matter.
00:23:44.080 Yeah.
00:23:44.220 Well, I should be clear that they actually had a currency and it was a hard alcohol and
00:23:49.340 whiskeys.
00:23:49.940 That's what they used as a currency in their districts.
00:23:52.560 Yeah.
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.
00:24:16.780 So alcohol is currency.
00:24:18.380 It actually makes me want to buy more vodka because it's not a bad idea.
00:24:23.380 So alcohol is currency people.
00:24:28.280 So and keep in mind, we'll get to their counter governments in a second because they're actually
00:24:32.220 important.
00:24:32.880 But I should also hear talk about their ethical system because it was a little different than
00:24:36.900 the Puritan ethical system.
00:24:38.120 So they were both Calvinists.
00:24:39.300 You know, they believed in predestination.
00:24:41.540 They believed that, you know, pretty much everything is a sin.
00:24:45.640 Dancing is a sin.
00:24:46.720 Music is a sin.
00:24:47.700 Sports.
00:24:48.100 Oh, that's definitely a sin.
00:24:49.180 You know, extramarital sex 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
00:25:06.700 things at all.
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
00:25:26.340 or something like that.
00:25:27.200 Like they have this is a category of sin.
00:25:29.300 This is a category of nonsense.
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
00:25:40.400 really that important.
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
00:25:50.200 their own body.
00:25:51.060 End quote.
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
00:26:03.400 and why specifically prostitution is bad.
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
00:26:14.480 into the world.
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
00:26:27.020 they have sex.
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
00:27:23.960 glory of God is a sin.
00:27:25.460 So if you can't reasonably argue that what you just did, you did for the glory of God,
00:27:29.360 you committed a form of sin.
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.
00:28:04.960 They're like, let's party tonight, you know?
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
00:28:26.480 a number of these anti-Confederacy rebels.
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
00:28:58.000 grandfather.
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
00:29:03.660 an old basil or something like that.
00:29:05.160 But that was the type of people they were, you know?
00:29:07.560 It was, we've got to do what's right.
00:29:08.980 We've got to do what fits our honor.
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
00:29:18.240 in an honorable life.
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
00:29:51.220 worth stealing to other people.
00:29:52.980 Again, don't engage with that stuff, right?
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.
00:30:34.900 And so where did they get those people from?
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
00:30:49.080 murdered people in a major U.S. city?
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
00:31:09.560 Pennsylvania.
00:31:10.180 I think they couldn't defend themselves well either because they'd never really done the
00:31:13.620 military stuff.
00:31:15.100 And I should note that these people actually went to war with a number of the other settlements.
00:31:18.960 It wasn't just the Quakers.
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
00:31:26.540 sort of D.C. area and stuff like that.
00:31:28.560 So they would regularly go to war against the other colonists when the other colonists would
00:31:32.340 abuse them too much.
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
00:31:40.760 them.
00:31:40.920 These people who didn't believe in war.
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.
00:31:49.000 They just expressed it differently.
00:31:51.580 They didn't want to take stuff, right?
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.
00:32:32.800 Therefore, we should move out there.
00:32:34.960 They were hardworking.
00:32:37.240 They like to put themselves in hard environments, which won them honor points among these people.
00:32:41.320 They just got along very well.
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.
00:33:05.200 They built these societies.
00:33:06.460 They had a few different breakaway states at points, but the main one was the, I'll call it
00:33:10.760 the regulator state.
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
00:33:43.200 without formal legal proceedings.
00:33:45.080 Although there is a claim that William Lynch, another Virginia planter of the same era, was
00:33:49.520 associated with the term.
00:33:50.560 It was a system of justice where when one person would do something bad, you would go into their
00:33:54.480 community and you would lynch them.
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
00:34:03.960 their communities.
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
00:34:19.900 genuinely were.
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
00:34:30.340 happened.
00:34:31.180 This was sort of a successor government to them that was much less formal than the full
00:34:35.820 regulator movement government was.
00:34:38.160 And for anyone looking for more information on this stuff, this is all covered in American
00:34:41.540 Nations.
00:34:42.220 So just go read that book.
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
00:34:54.220 doesn't go that deep into.
00:34:55.360 So any thoughts on this before I go into what happened to the Puritans who didn't meld with
00:35:00.240 this culture?
00:35:01.260 No, keep it going.
00:35:02.640 Okay, so the Puritans who meld with this culture, I'll talk a little about what happened to them
00:35:06.340 and their ethical system.
00:35:07.120 They began to adopt more of the ethical system that this culture had in its relationship to
00:35:12.600 sin.
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
00:35:25.680 all that.
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
00:35:52.420 with education.
00:35:53.560 And that was sort of the role that they filled.
00:35:55.440 And you actually see this from my ancestors.
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
00:36:04.820 movement was Jasper Collins.
00:36:06.480 He's actually the reason why we know about the movement to begin with, because he wrote the
00:36:10.400 primary book on the movement.
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
00:36:40.200 for them.
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.
00:36:49.380 They would help them in their rebellions.
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.
00:36:57.620 And I got this.
00:36:58.400 You can think of them as the helpful nerd.
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
00:37:24.940 the backwoods people.
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.
00:37:34.600 They'd hate all of your weird views.
00:37:37.160 And I think that this shows a misunderstanding of the way the backwood culture works now or
00:37:41.780 the way it worked historically.
00:37:43.360 Remember the backwoods people were the first ones to pick up like Indian ways of doing things
00:37:47.460 and stuff like that.
00:37:48.160 They don't have a lot of prejudice against people of different cultural practices or really
00:37:54.080 see things as quote unquote weird.
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
00:38:30.600 average American, Malcolm.
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
00:38:44.280 and run a landscaping company, right?
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
00:38:57.980 judgmental people.
00:38:59.140 And I've actually noticed they get along uniquely well from us in the Pennsylvania area when
00:39:03.500 I contrast it with Texas.
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
00:39:18.500 where I grew up, that just wasn't the case.
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.
00:39:29.220 But then the Puritan Puritans.
00:39:30.740 Well, why did the Puritan Puritans die out?
00:39:33.380 And they mostly died out in the 1800s.
00:39:35.720 And there are three reasons why they died out.
00:39:37.800 Do you have any thoughts before I want to go further, someone?
00:39:39.760 Mm-mm.
00:39:40.660 Okay.
00:39:42.240 So, reason number one, and by far, far, far the biggest reason, the Catholic immigrant
00:39:48.380 ways.
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,
00:40:04.280 Mormon territory.
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
00:40:39.800 we ran was in Peru.
00:40:41.240 And now I feel comfortable working in the U.S. because, you know, I've sort of proven that
00:40:44.400 my success wasn't due to any form of nepotism.
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
00:41:11.060 Boston.
00:41:11.580 Yet in 2009, over 50 percent of Massachusetts was still Catholic.
00:41:15.520 Like, that's wild.
00:41:17.540 Like, how much do you think was Puritan descendants?
00:41:19.540 Very small.
00:41:20.780 Yeah, a lot of Americans, 13 percent or so were descendants from the Mayflower, but they
00:41:23.780 didn't keep their culture intact.
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
00:41:41.280 these insane diets and everything like that.
00:41:43.140 Yeah.
00:41:43.220 And what were the Puritans actually marked by?
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.
00:41:55.760 The Puritans were incredibly pro-sex.
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
00:42:08.360 sex.
00:42:08.660 They were sex positive within marriage, we'll say.
00:42:11.240 It was in marriage, yeah.
00:42:12.840 But they were also like 100% about everything.
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
00:42:23.040 their rocking chair.
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.
00:42:34.300 Very intense people, yes.
00:42:37.060 Yeah, they were very intense people.
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
00:42:56.420 were more humble than your neighbor.
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
00:43:08.160 looking like.
00:43:09.120 But it was ridiculous.
00:43:09.940 It was ridiculous.
00:43:10.620 I'm more humble than you.
00:43:11.540 I'm more humble than you.
00:43:12.440 I'm more humble than you.
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.
00:43:20.600 Ah, yes.
00:43:21.340 I could not agree more.
00:43:22.480 How dare you express enjoyment.
00:43:24.780 My deepest apologies.
00:43:25.900 Your shoes are quite sensible.
00:43:27.740 They are four sizes too small.
00:43:29.060 The pain purifies my predilection for pleasure.
00:43:32.000 Your alliteration sounds dangerously like poetry.
00:43:35.600 My apologies.
00:43:37.140 Strike me silence.
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
00:43:50.460 around humility.
00:43:52.700 Because when the entire dominance hierarchy is based around humility and austerity, people
00:43:57.600 just go haywire.
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
00:44:13.040 my community.
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
00:44:29.040 went extinct.
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
00:45:10.700 isolation.
00:45:11.900 And a lot of people are like, when they look at the modern cultural groups and they go,
00:45:15.480 who's the descendants of the Puritans?
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.
00:45:25.840 That's the descendant culture of the Puritans.
00:45:27.860 Whereas the wokest are the descendant culture of Quakers.
00:45:29.760 We'll get into that in a different video.
00:45:30.800 But there are some still, like, cultural descendants of these Puritans.
00:45:34.940 But mostly, they went extinct.
00:45:36.960 And another thing that was really unique about the Puritan communities was the way their religious
00:45:40.680 worship was set up.
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
00:45:48.620 go to.
00:45:49.260 It was sort of like early social media.
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
00:46:09.380 austerity and humility.
00:46:11.780 Now, what you can tell is...
00:46:13.880 Aggressive virtue signaling to a certain extent.
00:46:16.900 Yes.
00:46:17.760 Is this then led to...
00:46:19.760 Now, we should talk about how the Puritans' virtue signal, because it's very different
00:46:22.480 from the way the Quakers...
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,
00:46:31.580 like, roll around and yell about stuff.
00:46:33.660 Very, like, modern woke people do, right?
00:46:36.360 With Puritans, it wasn't like that at all.
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.
00:46:45.420 It was...
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.
00:46:53.580 Where was I going?
00:46:54.460 How they died out.
00:46:55.380 Yes.
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
00:47:05.320 the next generation.
00:47:06.060 It was a very not-cool thing for kids.
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?
00:47:25.060 So that was one reason it really died out.
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.
00:47:45.560 Puritanism didn't spread very well.
00:47:47.520 Well, it didn't have as many rules.
00:47:49.580 It was just, like, a simpler message.
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
00:48:05.240 austerity, like, I don't see the point.
00:48:06.860 No one else in my church congregation is doing it.
00:48:08.960 And so they'd drop 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
00:48:25.920 a utopia.
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
00:48:41.380 how successful they ended up being.
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
00:48:58.200 normal conservative Jewish sect.
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
00:49:11.000 dedicated to austerity.
00:49:12.240 That's what the Scrooge stereotype was about.
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
00:49:22.740 people.
00:49:23.260 He just hoarded it.
00:49:25.040 But this doesn't end up looking like a city on a hill to outsiders or to an individual's
00:49:30.400 own kids.
00:49:31.160 After a few generations, they're like, wait, wait, wait, so when does the utopia come?
00:49:35.260 And so that also led a lot of people to leave.
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
00:50:03.200 of that generation.
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
00:50:15.480 like science.
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
00:50:42.820 sub-factions of them were.
00:50:44.300 This is something that's hugely forgotten about them in terms of the modern stereotype of the
00:50:51.000 Puritan.
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
00:51:03.680 forms possible.
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
00:51:58.740 fields.
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.
00:52:11.260 Plus one, anti-Catholic.
00:52:12.740 Plus three, wrote a book about their heterodox religious views.
00:52:15.280 Plus three, invented a new religion.
00:52:17.840 Plus three, invented a new Christian heresy.
00:52:19.840 Plus three, obsessed with religious tolerance.
00:52:22.540 Plus one, went to Harvard, Yale, or MIT.
00:52:24.640 Plus one, practiced law.
00:52:26.280 Plus three, in college society with a classical name.
00:52:28.740 Plus one, wrote a really weird book.
00:52:30.360 You can get three points for that.
00:52:31.920 Plus three, founded their own school.
00:52:33.720 A kid very similar to us.
00:52:34.880 Plus three, wrote a list of values.
00:52:36.740 Plus three, had plans to emanestize the eschaton.
00:52:39.640 Plus three, if they were a social reformer.
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.
00:52:51.520 Plus three, if they were an abolitionist.
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.
00:52:58.320 Plus three, for prohibition.
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
00:53:28.120 to become completely incompatible.
00:53:31.500 Because in these early waves of like the early waves of Darwinism and stuff like that, it
00:53:35.180 wasn't yet completely incompatible.
00:53:36.860 They were trying to find ways to make it more compatible with the older interpretations
00:53:40.500 of the Bible.
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.
00:53:54.360 So, thoughts, Simone?
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?
00:54:01.260 I am your wife, after all.
00:54:04.200 There's not much for you to say.
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
00:54:32.920 sort of Catholic descendant influenced.
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
00:54:52.140 lasting impact on our country and its culture.
00:54:55.200 And I think what drove the creation of the book American Nations was that it's not enough
00:55:02.360 to say that just four groups had this impact.
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.
00:55:20.600 I wouldn't agree with that at all.
00:55:22.480 No, really?
00:55:23.500 Okay.
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
00:55:35.220 they landed.
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.
00:55:42.880 So no, I wouldn't argue that at all.
00:55:45.440 I'm just arguing-
00:55:46.000 I said critical mass.
00:55:47.240 I didn't say all of them.
00:55:49.000 Well, no, but it's not based on numbers.
00:55:50.820 It's based on the time of period they came there, what organizations they were interacting
00:55:56.460 with.
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
00:56:30.720 structures.
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
00:56:51.300 live.
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.
00:57:25.880 Why would I move there?
00:57:26.760 That's incredibly dangerous.
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
00:57:35.820 to live in.
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
00:57:51.140 that nobody else wanted to be in.
00:57:53.440 And because of that, they never got wiped out.
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.
00:58:31.140 But that was part of their culture.
00:58:32.180 I've tried to keep this PG, mostly, but when I say dangerous, you shouldn't misunderstand this as
00:58:39.600 random violence.
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
00:59:02.100 your rights.
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.
00:59:27.120 That mentality, very, very savage.
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
01:00:05.040 families or something like that?
01:00:06.600 You know, they see all these orderly little kids line up, and that's not what they're going
01:00:09.880 to see.
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
01:00:31.240 media.
01:00:31.700 So this is probably just a baked-in genetic code that's within both of us that's sort
01:00:37.000 of playing out on loop at his young age.
01:00:40.120 Let the lobsters go, Octavian.
01:00:41.840 What just happened, Octavian?
01:00:42.880 Did you see them swim away?
01:00:44.500 Yeah.
01:00:45.620 You see?
01:00:46.200 Now they're all going home to their families.
01:00:48.480 I hope I can catch all the families in those buckets.
01:00:53.880 I love you.
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?
01:01:02.840 Yeah.
01:01:03.360 Wait, so you let them go so that they could go to their families, and then we could find
01:01:07.120 their families to catch them?
01:01:08.460 Yeah.
01:01:09.540 Okay, let's get all the lobsters to die.
01:01:13.920 I hurt things that hurt me.
01:01:17.760 Okay?
01:01:19.020 Oh, that's how you feel?
01:01:20.740 Yeah.
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?
01:01:39.720 I will get them to die.
01:01:42.000 And then they're friends, too?
01:01:45.360 Yeah.
01:01:46.020 And I just want to catch one.
01:01:50.160 Well, if I don't, I want to destroy all lobsters, not fish.
01:01:56.320 Oh, I'm going to die the lobster.
01:01:58.360 Oh, so you don't want to hurt the fish?
01:02:00.500 No.
01:02:01.760 I'm not going to let them do that.
01:02:04.240 I don't hate fish.
01:02:05.480 Has a lobster ever hurt you?
01:02:08.800 Yes.
01:02:10.340 I don't think so.
01:02:11.900 A lobster hurt me until 100 ppm.
01:02:16.820 Okay?
01:02:18.000 Oh, giving me some timelines here.
01:02:20.220 I was going by myself.
01:02:22.460 Was your car?
01:02:24.160 So you were driving my car one day, and a lobster attacked you?
01:02:29.560 Yeah.
01:02:30.580 And it hurt me.
01:02:32.020 It hurt to me when I was using the bus.
01:02:35.380 And I caught my computer, and they didn't know it for me.
01:02:38.860 And then I did not go to hurt.
01:02:41.080 By lobsters.
01:02:42.120 But I'm like, this is something to kill to lobsters.
01:02:45.880 A pangal.
01:02:47.300 Wait, what kills lobsters?
01:02:49.340 Pangal.
01:02:50.440 It kills 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.
01:03:08.880 Fish are in the category that won't hurt him.
01:03:11.280 Lobsters are in the category that might hurt him.
01:03:13.680 He hates the things that might hurt him.
01:03:15.940 And they must die, and their kids must die, and their families and friends must die.
01:03:19.960 Okay?
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,
01:03:26.640 he fabricates evidence.
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,
01:03:35.280 driving it by himself without me there.
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,
01:03:51.660 and they must kill 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.
01:04:11.560 You know, teach them about honor.
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.
01:04:39.760 The kid still gets punished, right?
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.
01:04:49.240 Doesn't mean the kid doesn't get punished.
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.
01:06:03.020 You can't turn it off like electricity.
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.
01:06:20.900 Recently, our kids told something.
01:06:23.580 And your lesson to him was he got punished because he got caught.
01:06:28.380 And you made that very clear to him.
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?
01:06:48.040 You didn't see me out of bed?
01:06:49.300 And she's like, no, I didn't see you out of bed.
01:06:50.660 So she gave him the treat.
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,
01:06:58.940 when they think they can get away with it,
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
01:07:12.460 when they hit the real world.
01:07:13.800 But this isn't necessarily true.
01:07:16.300 It is a cultural hypothesis.
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,
01:07:28.540 ends up putting the kid in a weaker position.
01:07:30.700 Whereas other people are like, no,
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,
01:07:47.600 you know, why, why'd you do that?
01:07:48.980 Like, that's what a pussy would do.
01:07:50.400 I was like, well, the kid was, you know, picking on another kid.
01:07:52.500 And she goes, that's what your fists are for.
01:07:53.620 Like, I'm supposed to.
01:07:54.280 And I was like, well, I'll get in trouble.
01:07:55.120 And she'd be like, good.
01:07:55.840 Like, that's a sign of honor.
01:07:57.320 Or what was another case?
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
01:08:08.540 and put it somewhere where he can't see it.
01:08:10.480 You have to be sneaky.
01:08:12.560 And so to me, it's good.
01:08:13.320 And he goes, oh.
01:08:14.380 He's like, I want the thing that my little brother has.
01:08:16.840 And so I was like, what do you need to be?
01:08:17.940 And he goes, oh, I need to be sneaky.
01:08:20.120 And so then he'll like, go get another toy and like pretend.
01:08:22.380 Sneaky and smart, he says.
01:08:23.840 It's so sweet.
01:08:24.500 And then the younger sibling will get tired of playing with the toy,
01:08:28.980 discard it somewhere.
01:08:30.000 And Octavian will come up to me with that toy and be like,
01:08:33.140 can you put this in my bed for me?
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,
01:08:46.840 which is the one from Stranger Things.
01:08:48.560 And I'm going to see if I can find this,
01:08:49.940 where it's just like a complete loud house.
01:08:52.200 And people have seen my kids in the video.
01:08:53.340 They know that like recreationally,
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
01:09:02.380 and punch at me or,
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
01:09:38.980 in terms of like kid roughhousing.
01:09:41.240 You don't hurt, you don't injure them.
01:09:43.200 You just roughhouse with them.
01:09:45.140 Well, yeah.
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
01:10:01.440 and you're not very thrilled about it,
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.
01:10:15.980 Well, it's also a context of,
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
01:10:26.800 for being too high energy or too happy.
01:10:29.780 And I think that a lot of parents, like, they can be like,
01:10:32.200 I don't do that.
01:10:33.240 Think about it.
01:10:34.700 I've seen a lot of parents do this.
01:10:36.380 A kid's just being too loud or running around too much.
01:10:39.280 And the parent's like, can you just calm down?
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
01:10:52.460 and engaging with the world.
01:10:54.640 And so while we do punish them,
01:10:55.940 we don't punish them ever for being too excited
01:10:58.380 to engage with the world.
01:11:00.540 And so I think it's going to lead to,
01:11:02.160 if we ever do get a reality show on us
01:11:04.160 or cameras in the house,
01:11:05.500 people are going to be like,
01:11:06.120 wow, these are very different from other influencer kids.
01:11:08.380 These kids are wild.
01:11:10.340 Actually, it reminds me, I'll post the pictures.
01:11:12.200 Well, I don't know if I can
01:11:13.120 because the kids are in their underwear in the pictures.
01:11:15.440 But there were these scary pictures last night
01:11:17.100 where Simone said goodnight to the baby in the crib.
01:11:20.780 And then-
01:11:21.260 Through a camera that we have mounted there.
01:11:23.680 Yeah.
01:11:23.920 And then what happens, Simone?
01:11:25.580 Well, then all the kids get immediately extremely hyper.
01:11:29.120 Everyone crawls into our infant's crib
01:11:32.700 and everyone just-
01:11:34.260 They start grabbing the camera,
01:11:36.540 staring at it and laughing maniacally.
01:11:39.080 And it looks terrifying.
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.
01:11:46.580 Yeah, it looks like a cage match.
01:11:48.080 And of course, it's a night vision camera.
01:11:50.420 So the way that the contrast comes out,
01:11:52.640 they look freaking terrifying.
01:11:54.220 Like with like black-eyed monsters.
01:11:56.160 It's nightmare fuel.
01:11:57.440 Oh my God.
01:11:57.820 This actually reminds you of this really funny thing
01:12:01.920 of like somebody from a non-clan-based culture
01:12:03.900 entering a clan-based culture.
01:12:05.380 So one of our family members
01:12:06.640 who my kids aren't related to
01:12:08.340 because it's through a marriage
01:12:10.660 is a bit older than them,
01:12:12.320 like four years, five years older than them.
01:12:14.920 And was attempting to sort of watch over them
01:12:17.860 during parts of the family reunion.
01:12:21.080 And the kids,
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.
01:12:28.880 And the kids just absolutely gooned on him.
01:12:32.840 I felt so bad for the kid
01:12:34.640 because this little like five and four-year-old
01:12:38.180 were picking on him relentlessly.
01:12:41.920 And in the way a five or four-year-old would like,
01:12:44.040 you know, he'd be walking towards it,
01:12:45.640 like jump him from behind and knock him over
01:12:48.560 and then start jumping on him.
01:12:49.920 Or he was supposed to like watch them
01:12:51.780 and he'd like run after one
01:12:53.640 and then the other one would run away
01:12:54.960 and then he'd get exhausted.
01:12:56.240 And so they'd just try to like tackle him down.
01:12:58.900 And because there's two of them,
01:13:00.260 they could get away with it.
01:13:01.740 And I just, he was so beleaguered after this
01:13:05.480 because I think that he was just like,
01:13:07.720 just follow the rules, guys.
01:13:09.400 Don't run away, guys.
01:13:10.420 Please stop.
01:13:11.420 Oh no.
01:13:14.500 And I was like, oh God.
01:13:16.120 But you know, I'm proud of them for their energy
01:13:18.780 and like not ever letting up about anything.
01:13:22.540 They weren't like genuinely mean.
01:13:24.560 Like I think he had,
01:13:25.760 he was sort of at his wits end,
01:13:28.420 but I don't think he felt like genuinely picked on,
01:13:31.300 picked on.
01:13:31.940 But it was very clearly like a cultural clash
01:13:35.360 in a way that, you know,
01:13:37.020 it was him versus the little clan of children.
01:13:40.040 And one was clearly just having fun,
01:13:43.420 toying with the person who was supposed
01:13:44.600 to be watching over them.
01:13:45.880 And I felt just so bad.
01:13:48.460 But I also was like,
01:13:49.700 I'm glad that my kids have so much
01:13:51.360 fighting spirit to them.
01:13:54.380 Can't keep them down.
01:13:56.020 Any other anecdotes from our parent raising
01:13:58.160 that you wanted to?
01:14:00.780 Well, we were just discussing last night.
01:14:03.680 Another back country tradition is
01:14:06.000 they sort of coined the term
01:14:07.640 little shits for children.
01:14:09.420 I remember growing up in the Bay Area,
01:14:11.240 hearing that phrase or term and thinking,
01:14:14.600 how could you call a child the little shit?
01:14:17.180 And then I met our children.
01:14:19.180 Like, oh my God.
01:14:19.760 That's what my parents called me growing up.
01:14:21.420 Yeah.
01:14:22.120 Yeah.
01:14:22.360 It is a technical term.
01:14:25.100 They're so little shits,
01:14:26.800 but not all children are little shits.
01:14:29.280 Oh my God.
01:14:29.920 Especially the littlest one.
01:14:32.640 She now that she's developing a personality,
01:14:35.600 absolutely loves hanging with people.
01:14:38.620 She loves to make eye contact
01:14:40.020 while openly defying you.
01:14:41.680 So if you say something like,
01:14:42.940 please don't drop your food on the floor,
01:14:45.060 she'll pick up the messiest scoop of food
01:14:47.180 she possibly can,
01:14:48.840 smile,
01:14:49.940 and just throw it onto the floor
01:14:52.220 while making perfect eye contact.
01:14:54.280 And I think she's probably on the spectrum.
01:14:55.980 She doesn't usually make eye contact.
01:14:57.780 She just makes it
01:14:58.660 when she really wants to piss you off.
01:15:00.200 When she wants to watch you get angry
01:15:03.280 at something she's doing.
01:15:04.980 I love thinking about,
01:15:06.000 we have that Jordan Peterson parenting video
01:15:07.920 where like, you know,
01:15:08.680 the way he did,
01:15:09.220 he parents will,
01:15:09.900 it wouldn't work with our kids.
01:15:11.760 I'll tell you that.
01:15:12.360 Like this whole,
01:15:13.040 I'll just sit in the room with the kid
01:15:14.640 until they eat their food.
01:15:15.760 Break their spirit.
01:15:16.940 Yeah.
01:15:17.260 I'm like, okay, one,
01:15:18.200 my kids would take that
01:15:18.920 as a personal challenge.
01:15:20.500 And two, what are they going to do?
01:15:21.540 They're going to like grab the spaghetti,
01:15:24.340 like put it on their head
01:15:26.340 or like toss it at you.
01:15:28.100 Like there's always a way
01:15:31.220 of creative opposition to any rule.
01:15:34.800 There really is.
01:15:35.360 People can be like,
01:15:35.920 well, I just sit there
01:15:36.720 and then make them do it again.
01:15:38.680 And there's a point where like,
01:15:39.880 they know that they've caused more pain for you
01:15:42.120 than you've caused for them.
01:15:43.180 And then they're like, fine.
01:15:44.200 Okay.
01:15:44.420 I won this dominance battle.
01:15:45.960 I'm out.
01:15:46.300 But like, you can't,
01:15:48.120 what?
01:15:48.840 You don't want to create those situations
01:15:51.000 with kids of this cultural background
01:15:53.520 of I will out willpower you.
01:15:56.940 That's not going to end well.
01:15:58.720 It's just not.
01:15:59.420 Oh God, no.
01:15:59.880 Yeah.
01:16:00.140 You've just got to teach them
01:16:01.600 a good enough honor code
01:16:03.200 and good enough rules
01:16:04.640 before they have the physical will
01:16:06.560 to totally resist you.
01:16:08.640 That's basically the timeline
01:16:10.360 you're working with.
01:16:11.480 I actually remember this.
01:16:13.000 Well, I think that's the difference also
01:16:14.720 between being consequentialist
01:16:17.640 versus deontological.
01:16:19.180 We want our children
01:16:20.260 to come to their own conclusions
01:16:21.880 on what's right.
01:16:23.340 Even if it's not exactly
01:16:24.740 what we would have thought to be correct.
01:16:26.380 We want them to make that
01:16:27.360 on judgment for themselves
01:16:28.300 and we want them to do what's right,
01:16:30.660 not things the way
01:16:31.620 that we want them to be.
01:16:33.020 Whereas I think a lot of parents
01:16:34.540 don't really care
01:16:35.720 that their children develop
01:16:36.680 their own internal morality
01:16:38.020 or make their own decisions.
01:16:39.940 They just want them
01:16:40.660 to follow specific rules
01:16:41.980 and behave in certain ways.
01:16:44.680 Yeah, you're absolutely right about that.
01:16:46.520 Yeah, it's not about the in-state.
01:16:48.540 It's about the,
01:16:49.820 well, and when you say a lot of parents,
01:16:51.240 I'd say a lot of cultures.
01:16:52.500 And it is right for those cultures
01:16:54.520 to act in a way
01:16:55.260 that is in alignment
01:16:55.960 with their cultural values.
01:16:56.940 I mean, keep in mind,
01:16:57.540 they co-evolved
01:16:58.240 with a set of cultural values.
01:16:59.900 They're going to behaviorally
01:17:02.080 and their kids behaviorally
01:17:03.380 are going to relate
01:17:04.320 to punishment techniques
01:17:05.920 and everything like that
01:17:06.800 different from other kids.
01:17:08.200 Like, I don't know
01:17:09.600 if normal non-backwards children
01:17:12.300 are genuinely as rowdy
01:17:13.960 as our kids are.
01:17:15.220 I mean, probably our cultural practices
01:17:17.120 help increase that.
01:17:18.300 I mentioned in another episode,
01:17:19.540 which is probably worth
01:17:20.100 mentioning briefly here,
01:17:20.900 is the incident of my mom
01:17:22.900 where I got in trouble
01:17:24.600 with one of the teachers.
01:17:25.360 And she's like,
01:17:25.800 well, I mean,
01:17:27.220 were you doing
01:17:27.780 what you thought was right?
01:17:28.860 And I was like, yeah.
01:17:29.920 And she goes, well,
01:17:30.540 you know, in the adult world,
01:17:32.180 everybody thinks teachers
01:17:33.100 are like underpaid losers.
01:17:34.740 So don't worry about it.
01:17:36.080 She's an elementary school teacher.
01:17:38.420 Just do what you think
01:17:39.220 is right yourself.
01:17:39.960 But again,
01:17:40.280 that's that very honor
01:17:41.200 code-based culture.
01:17:42.660 Like, do what you believe is right.
01:17:45.020 Ignore the teachers.
01:17:46.560 Which was, yeah,
01:17:47.440 definitely part of that
01:17:48.840 backwoods upbringing
01:17:49.700 and that had soaked
01:17:51.560 into this Puritan culture,
01:17:53.140 which ended up with this,
01:17:54.340 you know,
01:17:54.640 complete Puritan backwoods
01:17:56.140 mix of a culture.
01:17:57.160 I guess I didn't mention
01:17:58.020 this explicitly here,
01:17:59.420 but I thought I had.
01:18:00.680 The core, core reason
01:18:02.160 the backwoods Puritan mix
01:18:04.000 of a culture survived
01:18:05.220 was that it changed
01:18:07.480 its ethical system.
01:18:08.840 Whereas in the Puritan
01:18:10.200 ethical system,
01:18:11.620 everything was a sin
01:18:12.680 and you were supposed
01:18:13.400 to avoid basically everything.
01:18:15.780 In the backwoods ethical system,
01:18:17.660 everything was a sin
01:18:19.220 and you didn't really
01:18:21.300 put sins within a hierarchy.
01:18:23.260 It was just whatever
01:18:24.220 you needed to do
01:18:25.380 to achieve your
01:18:26.160 consequentialist outcome
01:18:27.440 where the consequentialist outcome
01:18:29.080 was what you thought
01:18:29.900 God's broader vision
01:18:31.200 was for you
01:18:31.900 or broader goals
01:18:33.040 for you were.
01:18:34.040 And it was just much easier
01:18:35.600 to follow this,
01:18:37.100 well, honestly,
01:18:37.820 more consequentialist
01:18:38.760 and less deontological
01:18:39.720 ethical system.
01:18:40.640 Absolutely love you, Simone.
01:18:41.880 I've had a joy
01:18:42.460 talking to you today.
01:18:43.300 I'm sorry I kept you so long.
01:18:45.060 And yeah,
01:18:46.220 I'll go get the kids.
01:18:47.920 I love you, Malcolm.
01:18:49.140 I love you too.
01:18:51.720 I really do.
01:18:54.560 I know you do.
01:18:55.620 You show it every single day.
01:18:57.160 You're just the best.
01:18:58.900 And then I can maybe...
01:19:00.100 Did you get the chickens?
01:19:01.440 Yeah, I got the chickens.
01:19:02.600 I handle the professor.
01:19:04.460 I've got it all sorted.
01:19:06.480 I just...
01:19:06.740 You handle just everything.
01:19:08.140 I'll never get over this.
01:19:09.100 Oh, you always tell the reporters
01:19:10.320 I handle so much.
01:19:11.640 You do.
01:19:12.040 Who took Toasty
01:19:13.840 to get his blood work today, Malcolm?
01:19:16.100 Oh, yeah, but...
01:19:17.080 Who woke up
01:19:17.580 and dressed the kids today, Malcolm?
01:19:20.720 I forgot about those things.
01:19:22.360 I guess I never log things
01:19:23.720 in my ledger
01:19:24.300 if I'm doing them.
01:19:25.140 I only, like, mentally log things.
01:19:26.720 I keep a ledger
01:19:27.520 and I keep it 50-50.
01:19:30.800 You don't keep it 50-50.
01:19:32.560 You do everything.
01:19:33.400 I see it.
01:19:34.200 Don't worry.
01:19:34.560 Don't worry.
01:19:35.400 You are the absolute best wife
01:19:37.200 anyone could want.
01:19:38.100 Actually, I wonder,
01:19:38.880 and this is something
01:19:39.280 that we should meditate on.
01:19:40.520 I kind of want to think about this.
01:19:41.800 This backward culture,
01:19:42.740 when I think about it
01:19:43.180 in regards to the way our kids act
01:19:44.340 and the way we parent,
01:19:45.280 that's one thing.
01:19:46.040 It's really interesting.
01:19:47.060 But also in the way
01:19:47.840 that our relationship is structured
01:19:49.620 and, like, our love
01:19:50.860 for each other works
01:19:52.020 is very different.
01:19:53.780 Like, it's based on
01:19:54.800 mutual respect
01:19:56.440 rather than, like,
01:19:57.240 a set of rules
01:19:58.180 about our duties.
01:20:00.080 Consequentialist
01:20:00.440 and not deontological.
01:20:02.340 Yeah.
01:20:03.060 Yeah, true.
01:20:04.280 Because, yeah,
01:20:05.120 damn, do I respect you, Simone,
01:20:07.480 in everything you do.
01:20:08.340 You are such a workhorse.
01:20:09.400 Because we're fighting
01:20:10.140 for the same thing.
01:20:11.940 And not just
01:20:12.700 telling things out.
01:20:14.840 Did you steal something?
01:20:17.240 When we were on vacation,
01:20:19.000 did you steal something?
01:20:20.420 No.
01:20:20.860 But you did do it
01:20:22.600 and you got caught doing it.
01:20:23.920 Yeah.
01:20:24.680 Well, police did not see me.
01:20:27.220 Oh, the police didn't see you.
01:20:29.500 But now you're on camera
01:20:31.040 so the police know
01:20:32.060 that you stole something.
01:20:33.780 No.
01:20:35.220 I don't want the police
01:20:36.720 to get me.
01:20:37.920 Well, they should.
01:20:39.080 Police don't whine.
01:20:40.960 But the police
01:20:41.740 are going to come
01:20:42.180 arrest you now.
01:20:43.400 No.
01:20:44.660 So, how do you explain to them?
01:20:46.320 Why did you break the rules?
01:20:50.360 I have no idea.
01:20:52.660 What's your idea?
01:20:54.000 If I have somebody,
01:20:58.340 some glasses,
01:20:59.840 then the police
01:21:01.980 will not know I am me.
01:21:04.540 Okay.
01:21:04.920 How about this?
01:21:05.380 You can wear daddy's glasses.
01:21:07.220 Okay.
01:21:07.660 Do you think
01:21:08.100 you're safe now?
01:21:09.820 Yes.
01:21:10.540 Are you safe
01:21:11.080 from the police?
01:21:12.080 Yeah.
01:21:12.920 They're not going to catch you?
01:21:14.480 Hold on.
01:21:15.020 I got to get away.
01:21:16.620 But I need this
01:21:17.920 to be clean, okay?
01:21:19.540 Daddy doesn't know
01:21:20.200 how to clean.
01:21:21.020 Mommy mostly cleans.
01:21:23.680 Fine.
01:21:24.120 Then,
01:21:24.920 can I just tell Mommy
01:21:26.000 while I talk to the police?
01:21:29.420 What are you going
01:21:30.540 to tell the police
01:21:31.240 when they ask
01:21:31.880 why did you steal?
01:21:33.260 Okay.
01:21:33.540 You can do this
01:21:33.960 by yourself.
01:21:34.540 Okay.
01:21:36.620 I'm stealing.
01:21:37.700 So, that stealing
01:21:38.880 is unthinkable.
01:21:41.080 to me
01:21:41.780 to not get under arrest
01:21:44.140 because
01:21:44.640 I just don't want
01:21:48.120 to be under arrest
01:21:49.080 because
01:21:49.680 I'm just so sick
01:21:52.000 to not get under arrest.
01:21:54.360 I just take something
01:21:55.660 from the people
01:21:56.720 and I put it on
01:21:58.420 and then
01:21:59.180 you will not know
01:22:01.500 I cannot get under arrest.
01:22:04.380 So, you cannot know
01:22:05.480 I cannot get under arrest
01:22:08.460 because
01:22:09.080 that's a sickie thing.
01:22:13.140 I'm just trying
01:22:14.060 to run away.
01:22:16.160 I'm just so sick
01:22:17.360 so you can get
01:22:19.080 I'm just so sick
01:22:22.400 and you know
01:22:26.540 what happens next
01:22:29.620 you are getting
01:22:32.000 and you know
01:22:33.460 what happens
01:22:34.280 if you are
01:22:35.600 arrest me
01:22:36.820 I'm gonna arrest
01:22:38.900 you boys.
01:22:41.320 So, that
01:22:42.120 is being
01:22:43.000 not nice.
01:22:44.980 Well, if you see
01:22:46.420 a bad guy
01:22:47.120 at someone's home
01:22:48.660 I do not have
01:22:51.160 stripes
01:22:51.620 like a bad guy
01:22:53.360 so I cannot
01:22:54.660 be arrested
01:22:55.420 and that
01:22:56.340 is a head
01:22:57.200 block
01:22:57.640 out of town.
01:22:59.060 So, dad
01:23:03.880 the same way
01:23:05.600 broadcast
01:23:06.180 I'm broadcasting
01:23:08.340 you
01:23:09.420 are
01:23:10.860 I don't have
01:23:12.560 stripes
01:23:13.120 like a bad guy
01:23:14.280 so I'm safe.
01:23:16.120 Oh, if you
01:23:17.120 cause the
01:23:17.860 stripes
01:23:18.640 like a bad guy
01:23:19.920 with stripes
01:23:20.800 on
01:23:21.300 that's out
01:23:22.780 of deal
01:23:23.360 you gotta
01:23:24.060 arrest them
01:23:24.880 okay
01:23:25.420 oh, if you
01:23:26.580 don't
01:23:27.040 you are
01:23:27.940 getting under
01:23:28.760 arrest
01:23:29.360 place
01:23:29.760 that
01:23:30.200 is how
01:23:30.960 the talking
01:23:31.720 is how
01:23:32.300 oh, there's
01:23:33.600 one thing
01:23:34.380 I ain't gonna
01:23:34.980 tell you
01:23:35.880 arrest
01:23:37.660 bad guys
01:23:38.600 arrest
01:23:39.880 bad guys
01:23:40.620 that do
01:23:41.140 bad things
01:23:42.020 okay
01:23:42.700 not
01:23:43.800 kids
01:23:44.400 that have
01:23:44.980 stripes
01:23:45.740 like a bad
01:23:46.700 guy
01:23:47.100 by police
01:23:48.360 What would you
01:23:48.960 do with the
01:23:49.480 bad people
01:23:50.120 when you
01:23:50.620 take over
01:23:51.100 um
01:23:52.240 bought them
01:23:54.020 you bought
01:23:55.040 them
01:23:55.400 yeah
01:23:56.220 um
01:23:57.180 would you
01:23:58.400 how
01:23:58.720 would you
01:24:01.880 put them
01:24:02.180 in jail
01:24:02.600 yeah
01:24:03.920 oh my
01:24:05.860 gosh
01:24:06.380 hey you
01:24:07.320 I want
01:24:08.420 it
01:24:08.620 I broke
01:24:09.160 this
01:24:09.620 um
01:24:10.520 Torsten
01:24:11.140 is life
01:24:12.340 good even
01:24:12.940 though it's
01:24:13.260 hard sometimes
01:24:14.000 um
01:24:14.660 yeah
01:24:14.940 so you
01:24:19.800 like being
01:24:20.200 alive
01:24:20.580 yeah
01:24:21.720 well what
01:24:22.660 about the
01:24:22.920 antinatalists
01:24:23.500 who think
01:24:23.760 you never
01:24:24.080 should have
01:24:24.340 been born
01:24:24.800 I mean
01:24:25.340 they
01:24:25.520 yeah
01:24:26.140 they
01:24:26.960 Torsten
01:24:28.060 what
01:24:28.700 there's
01:24:29.440 people who
01:24:29.920 say
01:24:30.160 that you
01:24:30.940 shouldn't
01:24:31.640 exist
01:24:32.160 are they
01:24:32.640 bad
01:24:32.880 people
01:24:33.260 yeah
01:24:34.260 yeah
01:24:34.340 I guess
01:24:34.880 I guess
01:24:36.060 I can
01:24:36.560 bop
01:24:37.040 them
01:24:37.680 you're
01:24:38.140 gonna
01:24:38.280 bop
01:24:38.640 them
01:24:38.920 yeah
01:24:39.420 well I
01:24:40.920 don't know
01:24:41.220 if that's
01:24:41.580 legal
01:24:41.900 but when
01:24:43.200 you're
01:24:43.520 when you're
01:24:44.000 emperor
01:24:44.400 you can
01:24:45.060 make it
01:24:45.420 legal
01:24:45.800 do you
01:24:48.700 having fun
01:24:49.020 with the
01:24:49.220 microphone
01:24:49.640 yeah
01:24:50.500 is
01:24:52.020 is
01:24:52.400 you
01:24:52.820 yeah
01:24:55.560 you
01:24:56.900 can
01:24:57.340 you
01:24:57.740 you