Based Camp - Aztecs Worshiped Cosmic Horror (Make HP Lovecraft Look Like Dr. Suess)

00:00:00.000 It almost reminds me of the urban monoculture, which is an entire society obsessed with pleasure.

00:00:05.040 Or an inversion of that.

00:00:06.540 How much pain can you assert within your own life and those around you?

00:00:10.340 Yeah, bouquets of flowers were to be sniffed only at the outer edges.

00:00:14.660 The swooning sweetness at the center belonged not to men, but to tea.

00:00:17.520 Oh, so you weren't even allowed to be happy or experience any pleasure not even smelling a flower. 0.97

00:00:22.980 Not even smelling a bouquet of freaking flowers. 0.88

00:00:25.900 the will of tea was also made manifest in the brutal public torture and execution of a warrior 0.90

00:00:31.500 or priest who stumbled quote his warrior regalia stripped from him his scalp locks shorn his heart

00:00:38.500 excised his empty body broken into its parts and dispersed to be eaten to eaten okay i didn't get

00:00:46.560 to the what this is just like your well one of your your friends accidentally stumbles in a parade 0.88

00:00:53.420 ceremony or something and it's not like a well he's in a better place it's like well of course

00:00:58.360 we had to tear him apart and eat him human sacrifice was not an occasional or incidental

00:01:02.660 religious custom like an extra spicy church service for the people who only show up on 0.80

00:01:07.080 christmas or easter no the mass butchery of wailing pleading captives of both sexes and all ages 0.90

00:01:13.040 was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved their art their

00:01:18.580 music their poetry their approach to warfare their entire economic system wait every day they had to

00:01:24.640 make personal sacrifices of blood i really feel like the worshipers of one of the dark gods from

00:01:29.820 hp lovecraft he nails it somehow achieved civilizational scale would you like to know more

00:01:35.020 hello malcolm i am excited to be speaking with you today because i would like to talk about my

00:01:41.740 favorite favorite extinguishment of of a people because i'm done you shouldn't be talking about

00:01:48.400 favorite i know there's that you know your space king drove my race to near extinction once okay

00:01:57.680 awesome for real and i think that you're going to agree with me after you read and we're not so

00:02:05.700 there's this book that was that was created called aztecs an interpretation by inga clendon

00:02:13.500 clintonen um from cambridge university press published in 1991 this is not new news

00:02:19.500 but it's new news to me because it's not disputed news i would tell you it's not no major historical

00:02:26.620 scholar disputes how evil the aztecs were yeah um that that is because yeah that there is abundant

00:02:34.380 evidence they were not like shy about how they went about things and why they did them and all

00:02:40.580 these things but i genuinely did not know how bad it was and the only reason i know now is that john

00:02:48.760 smith of mr and mrs smith's bookshelf which is one of my favorite substacks wrote a book review

00:02:54.780 about this 1991 book because why are you reading book reviews is this something you do recreationally

00:03:01.160 there is this couple okay they go on substack by mr and mrs smith um but p p s m i t h so like the 0.54

00:03:10.160 the p is silent okay they're they write so it's like a gay version of smith i don't know okay but

00:03:16.920 here's the thing is they they have a bunch of kids like a lot of kids and they're pretty like based 0.71

00:03:21.680 about the way that they raise them okay they have this like weird idyllic life where the way it

00:03:26.400 seems from their sub stack is they just sit around with their kids and just read a whole bunch of

00:03:31.120 intellectual books and talk about them and to me it's like this idyllic cozy life of like what you

00:03:36.040 would do with unlimited money um and it sounds what do we do with our unlimited cozy life well

00:03:41.500 we talk about low culture and perhaps that is a lot more fun so i do quite like girls and vtubers

00:03:46.960 and our lollies okay the the high the highbrow version of our aspirational life is mr and miss

00:03:54.480 smith and i love their sub stack and so here i am um sitting in the lobby of of our fertility clinic

00:04:03.900 waiting for post um what's the word post miscarriage blood work um with the documentary

00:04:10.720 team filming me in my moment of of humiliation and um i decide to read this because i'm like

00:04:17.500 this will distract me i'll look a new book review this will this will cheer me up i love reading

00:04:21.700 their book reviews they're always inspiring and intellectual and then i just come away like just

00:04:26.820 shook just totally shook so i'm just gonna i'm just gonna start reading and you're gonna tell

00:04:30.740 me just how good you feel about these people having left the the planet um that they're gone

00:04:36.720 that there may be some diaspora left but they've been conquered fully by the spanish and more 0.99

00:04:40.940 importantly by just infectious disease which is i've never been so no no the aztecs were more

00:04:47.760 conquered by the spanish than infectious disease oh no they were more conquered by infectious

00:04:52.060 disease really continue so i double checked my memory on this and simone is wrong on this one

00:04:57.680 The Aztecs were, one, if you're going to say what was the number one thing that led to their downfall, it was all of the groups that hated them and ended up supporting the Spanish, then the Spanish, and a third disease. Disease did come at the wrong time for them and made their military forces weaker, but it wasn't the instrumental piece of their downfall as it was for many other native groups.

00:05:21.340 mm-hmm yeah um and when we just like yeah anyway it was more that plus like they were already kind

00:05:27.200 of hoisted by their own petard as well because it turns out everyone around them hated them

00:05:33.460 for real like the spanish came in and they were like so we're gonna like eradicate your ruling

00:05:40.660 dynasty and people were like oh i am so about that i am so about that don't let me stop you sir

00:05:47.160 Don't let me, I have my own troops here.

00:05:50.800 Would you like them as well?

00:05:52.500 Yeah, for real, and you're going to understand why.

00:05:54.940 So I'm just, okay, here we go, right?

00:05:56.860 Here, he writes, Mr. Pismith writes,

00:06:00.260 when Hernán Cortés landed in the New World,

00:06:02.660 the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan

00:06:04.340 was one of the greatest cities anywhere on earth.

00:06:07.220 It had more than twice the population of Seville,

00:06:09.440 Seville, what, Seville, Seville, Seville, whatever.

00:06:12.520 Stop pronouncing foreign words correctly, Simone. 0.96

00:06:14.960 I'm so, I didn't do it.

00:06:16.280 shot i did disgusting un-american words well i didn't do it right about i didn't do it right

00:06:21.420 anyway and was as my grade school history textbooks always nervously assured me cleaner

00:06:26.960 more orderly more magnificent than any contemporaneous european city its ochre

00:06:32.680 towers and pyramids rose like a dream from the shimmering waters of lake texaco texaco

00:06:38.680 texacoco is this a lake you know about yeah i went there all the time as a kid i've been to

00:06:46.740 the ruins multiple times i had to study them as a kid because my family always made me study any

00:06:52.120 civilization that we were going to go see this is so true okay fine texacoco unlike the organic

00:06:58.160 maze of alleyways that characterized most spanish cities tanuchis lawns public gardens and temple

00:07:03.900 districts in grand processional ways were a product of the sort of high modernist urban

00:07:09.820 planning that Europe wouldn't really see until Hussmann's Paris in the 19th century. The walls

00:07:15.460 of the city shone with lime and were decorated with paintings, so it glimmered like a bobble

00:07:20.180 in the Mexican sun. The soldiers who followed Cortes on one hand described it as so ethereal

00:07:27.160 it seemed the three causeways joining it to the mainland were anchors without which it might float

00:07:32.180 away, but on the other hand, were overawed by the towering height and hallucinatory bulk of the

00:07:38.220 Great Pyramid topped with its twin temples of Huichu. And in addition to being an architectural

00:07:45.340 miracle, the city and empire which fed it were also an economic and social miracle. The Valley

00:07:51.180 of Mexico had a dangerously irregular growing season, lacks crucial minerals, and is frequently

00:07:56.600 subject to earthquakes, volcanoes, drought, and destructive floods. Despite such circumstances

00:08:01.860 hostile to any sort of economic surplus or capital accumulation, the Aztecs, or more properly,

00:08:07.820 as they called themselves, the Mexica, managed to create and maintain a complex social order,

00:08:13.080 which astonished the Spaniards with its state-run economic guilds, fine gradations of social

00:08:18.440 hierarchy, and carefully maintained mannered etiquette. The questions people usually ask,

00:08:23.660 given all this are, how did the Spaniards win? And how did they win so quickly and decisively?

00:08:28.980 I understand the allure of these questions and why they have captured the imaginations of

00:08:34.380 generations of historians and anthropologists. They're reasonable questions. But after reading

00:08:39.380 Inga Klendemann's book, I find I no longer have any interest in these questions because all of

00:08:44.560 my thought is bent toward another one. Why didn't God destroy the Aztecs sooner? Yes. Okay.

00:08:52.240 he writes in fairness he did destroy them pretty quickly the ancestors of the mexico wandered into

00:08:58.920 the fertile basin that was to become their empire sometime in the late 1200s or early 1300s

00:09:04.620 they found it already settled with a mosaic of mostly new 12 speaking city states and spent a

00:09:10.300 few decades as mercenaries or tributaries for various stronger powers one of those petty wars 1.00

00:09:15.440 went badly and they finally settled down as bedraggled refugees on the muck covered islands 1.00

00:09:20.800 that were to be the site of their future glory. 1.00

00:09:23.460 Within a hundred years,

00:09:24.760 they were the most powerful city in the valley. 0.86

00:09:26.840 50 years after that, they were unquestioned hegemon

00:09:29.380 and begin to launch wars of imperial expansion

00:09:32.400 towards the Pacific and Caribbean coasts.

00:09:34.900 Another 50 years of imperial glory,

00:09:37.020 and then they were destroyed utterly.

00:09:39.280 Or as Kleneman puts it,

00:09:41.100 a man whose grandfather had fought as a hireling

00:09:43.600 in another city's wars in the Mexica's early days

00:09:46.280 in the valley would himself have seen the glory

00:09:48.660 of their achieved empire and his son watched its destruction. None of this would have come

00:09:54.080 as a surprise to the Mexico. Their entire cosmology revolved around the absolute precarity 1.00

00:09:59.680 of the world as they believed that all earthly things were balanced on a knife's edge between

00:10:03.780 a ravenous abyssal powers on one side and the emptiness of the void on the other. Every 52

00:10:10.140 years, the entire nation would breathlessly, waited breathlessly at the ceremony of the new fire

00:10:14.960 to see whether the world would continue or not.

00:10:17.560 On a lonely hill outside the city,

00:10:19.500 senior priests feverishly worked a hand drill

00:10:22.120 upon the naked breast of a bound captive.

00:10:24.900 If the gods sent fire, it meant the world was saved

00:10:27.940 and the victim's chest was immediately torn open

00:10:30.380 so that the flame could be fed,

00:10:31.960 with his heart and flesh bubbling and growing

00:10:34.440 within the chest cavity,

00:10:36.020 to the relieved cheers of the populace

00:10:38.720 before being carried to a major temples of the city.

00:10:41.900 Everybody knew that if the fire did not come,

00:10:44.180 the world would slip into nothingness and stop existing before we are tempted to roll our eyes

00:10:50.020 at this and ask how suspenseful it really could have been remember the they only got to do it

00:10:54.920 three or four times between the foundation of their empire and its extinction the empire was

00:11:00.180 not gentle few empires are but even by the sad standards of human history the mexico were extreme

00:11:06.260 i'm not speaking here about their legendary creative and intensive ways 0.87

00:11:10.040 of humiliating subject peoples i'm speaking about the human sacrifice

00:11:14.180 I'm speaking about the human sacrifices.

00:11:15.660 No, those were not exaggerated by the colonizers, as some revisionist historians would have you believe. 0.58

00:11:22.460 If anything, the Spaniards lacked the conceptual framework to fully comprehend the industrial scale ever so civilized and bureaucratic evil of the Mexica.

00:11:31.900 And so they had inadvertently downplayed it. 0.91

00:11:34.540 The reality, as Clendenin brilliantly documents, is that human sacrifice was not an occasional or incidental religious custom for the Mexica,

00:11:42.760 like an extra spicy church service for the people who only show up on Christmas or Easter.

00:11:47.460 No, the mass butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages 0.95

00:11:52.220 was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved.

00:11:56.960 Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system,

00:12:01.860 the kaleidoscopic array of holidays and festivals were all singularly dedicated to the killing,

00:12:07.300 often preceded by inventive torture, of helpless human beings.

00:12:10.400 And everybody had their role to play.

00:12:12.760 he quotes from the book,

00:12:14.600 the killings were not remote top of the pyramid affairs.

00:12:17.840 If only high priests and rulers killed,

00:12:19.820 they carried out most of their butcher's work in plain air, 0.83

00:12:23.100 not only in the main temple precinct,

00:12:25.580 but in the neighborhood temples and on the streets.

00:12:28.200 The people were implicated in the care and preparation of the victims,

00:12:31.280 their delivery to the place of death,

00:12:32.980 and in the elaborate processing of the bodies,

00:12:35.540 the dismemberment and distribution of the heads and limbs,

00:12:38.440 flesh and blood, and flayed skins.

00:12:39.780 On high occasions, warriors carrying the gourds of human blood or wearing the dripping skins of

00:12:45.200 their captives ran through the streets to be ceremoniously welcomed into the dwellings.

00:12:49.980 The flesh of their victims seethed in domestic cooking pots. The human thigh bones scraped and

00:12:55.260 dried were set up in the courtyards of households. And all this among people notable for precisely

00:13:00.540 ordered polity, a grave formality of manner and developed regard for beauty. The scale of it.

00:13:07.200 now mr hold on here by the way if you're if you want to see a good movie that i think it does a

00:13:12.020 good job to pay have you seen apocalypto i i haven't because i know i can't stomach it

00:13:17.680 have you seen it yes great movie it did a very good i mean mel gibson won obviously a great

00:13:23.060 director you did yeah two words that's all you really need and the crazy thing about apocalypto

00:13:29.460 is that it's not even about the aztecs it's about the significantly less violent and less horrific 0.58

00:13:35.360 Mayans, and it's still a level of horror in a civilization, a level of dehumanization

00:13:40.340 of outsiders that is almost unfathomable.

00:14:05.360 but uh it's it's uh it does a good job of showing because when you listen to the

00:14:20.800 retellings of this city right they paint it as this beautiful pristine place in a modern context

00:14:29.340 because they're being revisionist historians and it prevents you from i think conceptualizing

00:14:35.080 what it was really like and what apocalypto does is it shows it but what you see is no

00:14:44.600 it would have looked most closer to what we today would think of as a third world country

00:14:50.980 with butchery happening on every other block um

00:14:54.640 and a cast of elite who are both uh like don't care like there's like the fat kid who's like

00:15:18.260 got his face painted and everything and is giggling at what's happening

00:15:21.400 um and like there is an elite cast was in this city but the vast majority of people was in the

00:15:33.980 city are living if you're talking about a city of that size in that period without antibiotics

00:15:40.240 without proper sanitation that are living lives of just abject horror um and that was the majority 1.00

00:15:50.160 of even the safe people was in an Aztec society oh and you'll see pretty soon that like even the 0.73

00:15:57.700 high priests like no one was well sorry i get my Aztecs confused with my Mayans yeah Mayans were

00:16:03.700 also pretty messed up was it the Aztecs who took stingray hooks um and tied them to a string and

00:16:09.640 then pulled them through their foreskin or was that the Mayans why not both i don't know why not 0.74

00:16:15.600 No, I mean, a lot of these people were pretty effing evil. 0.94

00:16:20.800 So I think what's notable about this, too, because, you know, we had we had an episode where I kind of crashed out on Native American practices. 1.00

00:16:28.460 Right. And one of the big points that I wanted to make in that episode is, look, every uncivilized society is likely to go through this. 0.84

00:16:37.080 The scary thing about being human is that when you have humans without God, what we can call pre-atomite humans, right, who have not yet learned judgment, like moral judgment between that which is good and evil themselves and taken personal responsibility for it, you can have people capable of unspeakable cruelty.

00:16:55.900 Because you have animals, like we're animals, but we're so freaking smart. And we're also capable of much higher and more elaborate than most mammals levels of suffering because of that intelligence. So it's this double-edged terror sword of capability of inflicting pain in very elaborate ways and capability of feeling it in very elaborate ways, which is horrific.

00:17:18.960 Like, and then, so once you, I wanted to, like, at the time, I was like, well, once you put civilization on top of that, maybe it's not just about being pre or post-Adamite.

00:17:27.420 Like, once there's civilization in general, that doesn't happen anymore.

00:17:30.440 But I'm realizing with this tale of the Aztecs that it is not civilization that makes you a human.

00:17:40.820 It is a moral judgment.

00:17:43.360 It is God.

00:17:44.680 Well, no, but hold on.

00:17:45.600 i want to go further than this because you you talk about this and you can talk about this in

00:17:49.900 a christian context or in a jewish context or whatever but if you go to um you know ancient

00:17:56.140 europe or ancient china or ancient japan you find some horrifying civilization absolutely if we're 0.60

00:18:04.840 going to ancient europe right um and you're looking like actually if i'm looking at all

00:18:10.560 of these regions for like the absolutely most evil civilizations uh the two that come to mind

00:18:17.180 are the assyrians and the egyptians the early egyptians um but if you compare the assyrians 0.97

00:18:24.160 and the early egyptians to the aztecs they don't come close it's it's and this is wild to me 0.96

00:18:32.460 that like to get an equivalent of the assyrians which are probably the most evil non-american 0.85

00:18:40.560 america's civilization and we're talking about the evil and the problem is if you're talking 1.00

00:18:45.080 about like the large american civilizations like a huge chunk of them if you're talking let's say

00:18:50.420 below like the middle of the united states right so like um the seminoles the comanche the aztec

00:18:59.160 the the mayans the incans um like if we're actually ranking these in terms of like

00:19:05.720 evil civilizations uh aztecs i always remember like i wasn't particularly interested in the

00:19:11.180 aztecs because i thought that they were so comically evil and short-lived that they

00:19:14.760 almost weren't interesting to me um i found the mayans more interesting but they're you know

00:19:20.140 they were also extremely ephemeral as a civilization yeah they were above the aztecs

00:19:24.440 by not by much then above that you get uh the comanche um uh it's still very evil but not quite 0.97

00:19:33.740 makes them less evil is the fact that they were not they didn't build an entire civilization that

00:19:39.280 was like organized around it when they did insane violent things like the scale they were able to

00:19:44.280 achieve was lower thank goodness yeah the comanche were more like if you ever see like a fallout

00:19:50.300 universe or something like that yeah they have like the raiders horrific raiders yeah yeah they're

00:19:54.660 just like the bad guys from any mad max universe which is yeah which is unspeakable and horrible

00:20:00.720 but here you have an entire civilization and we're going to get into the detail because i'm not done

00:20:07.100 oh yes people who are unaware the incas were also super evil um everyone around the inca

00:20:15.800 hated the inca um which is so funny because in all my little like kid history things it's like

00:20:21.360 oh like they counted things and they they had runners that went across the mountains and they

00:20:25.960 were so cool they had gold stuff yeah it was i'd probably put the inca at around the same level of

00:20:31.960 the assyrians so we've already put all of these people under the assyrians and if you're going to 0.90

00:20:38.000 compare that with the groups that we see as evil today like the iranian government having people 0.93

00:20:42.280 you know hanging from construction cranes just like around the city or uh islamist groups like 0.99

00:20:48.700 isis and stuff like that uh these groups may be evil but like they are fucking poodles compared 0.99

00:20:55.600 to a group like the assyrians or the aztec uh the the level of evil we see from groups like those 1.00

00:21:04.060 just don't compare and even if you're looking at the groups today like the stuff that's happening 1.00

00:21:08.340 in darfur and stuff like that is is quite at another level but even that stuff doesn't come

00:21:13.600 close to the aztecs or the assyrians or any of the groups we're talking about here here we're

00:21:18.720 talking about a form of existential evil which i think lovecraftian really captures it it is

00:21:25.400 a lovecraftian monster compared to a normal movie monster

00:21:29.120 and i note here if you're comparing them to biblical groups like the amylkites who god said 0.56

00:21:35.900 we needed to eradicate all of and people were like well it's because they were super evil they

00:21:41.100 did child sacrifices, the Amalekites did nothing, nothing comparable to the Aztecs. In fact, if 1.00

00:21:48.520 you're talking about the bad guys from the Bible, the Aztecs are, I don't know, like a hundred times 0.97

00:21:55.980 worse than any of them. Like, keep in mind, we're putting the Comanches at the low end of our 1.00

00:22:03.060 existential horror of Southern Native American groups, and they did things like tied babies to 0.98

00:22:09.880 a string threw them into cactuses and dragged them as funsies okay see our episode on that or 0.99

00:22:17.720 read that account i can't talk about that in front of simone but they were mortifying and

00:22:23.180 they are like below many of these other groups okay um e.g the reason i put the inca and the

00:22:31.400 assyrians at the same level is they both had this similar practice of like torturing anyone who they 0.92

00:22:37.740 conquered and making a big show of it so like everyone knew that they like tortured and 0.88

00:22:42.520 brutalized the conquered people but it was sort of like a one-time and occasional deal for them 0.87

00:22:48.680 it wasn't as institutionalized as like for the Assyrians the Assyrians yeah they'd like 0.61

00:22:54.360 absolutely f you up but it was like a when they were conquering you thing it wasn't like uh and 0.91

00:23:00.520 then we come back every few months and do it again thing no it also wasn't it wasn't philosophically

00:23:06.000 driven and as we get deeper into this you'll see that the entire it was very um uh pragmatic it 0.86

00:23:11.600 was yeah it was about like i big man i big gorilla i kill you you know don't mess with me like that's

00:23:17.480 it like that it's it's a deterrent it was meant as a deterrent and like a like a showing off of

00:23:22.680 strength and it was tactical in that way um and then i put slightly above all of these groups

00:23:28.340 siminals um who who were absolutely brutal but they mostly were brutal to protect themselves

00:23:35.880 um and maintain sovereignty in a very dangerous area to live yeah yeah a lot of it was sort of

00:23:42.900 reactionary who by the way today on the hard rock cafe chain i did not know that well the more you

00:23:49.220 know anyway continue anyway never going there again i'm so mad at them still um i'm sorry no

00:23:56.600 Look, the people who are live today who are seminal did not have anything to do with this stuff before.

00:24:00.980 I should not judge.

00:24:02.520 That is wrong.

00:24:03.760 That is the wrong.

00:24:04.820 That is wrong.

00:24:07.820 I will get over this.

00:24:09.880 Continue.

00:24:10.480 I will get over this.

00:24:11.060 Okay.

00:24:13.300 Mr. Smith now continues.

00:24:15.460 The scale of it boggles the mind.

00:24:17.160 The Mexico record with pride.

00:24:18.780 Or sorry.

00:24:19.140 The Mexico record with pride.

00:24:20.720 A single festival occasion on which over 20,000 victims were sacrificed.

00:24:25.760 the blood rolling in a slow curtain down the steps of the pyramids as 20 000 people

00:24:31.940 now i gotta point out here we we do not have equivalent records from european history

00:24:37.940 like this is wild um there are some things that that rome did but you've got to keep in mind the

00:24:45.200 scale of rome compared to this yeah the the sheer amount of population available like the percentage

00:24:51.400 points we're talking about here are unfathomable. Anyways, four lines of manacled slaves trudged

00:24:58.540 along the great processional ways toward their doom. It was the job of special priests to greet

00:25:03.820 the captives as they entered the city and to explain to them in great detail the honor that

00:25:08.880 was to await them. And it was always human beings. Many primitive cultures have practiced forms of

00:25:13.940 animal sacrifice. The Mexico were never primitive nor interested in animals. There was nothing,

00:25:19.160 there was also no othering at work here the mexican knew that they were killing people 1.00

00:25:24.280 who thought and felt and dreamed and loved as they did in fact that was the entire point of it 1.00

00:25:30.480 they constructed an efficient and well-run machine that has as its sole purpose delivering

00:25:35.080 living breathing conscious and informed human beings to the killing stone or the furnace a

00:25:40.220 whole battery of sophisticated psychological techniques were employed to ensure the compliance

00:25:44.080 of the victims to the end. 0.89

00:25:45.700 Yes, the Spaniards lacked the vocabulary to describe it,

00:25:49.120 but we who live in the aftermath

00:25:50.640 of the 20th century do not.

00:25:53.240 Clendenin writes, 0.83

00:25:54.900 It was a Holocaust plus.

00:25:57.140 He actually uses sci-fi to explain it, 0.94

00:25:59.020 which has actually really helped me understand it.

00:26:00.500 Okay, great, go for it.

00:26:01.460 It's the combination of violence

00:26:03.180 with the apparent impersonality,

00:26:05.180 the bureaucratic calculation

00:26:06.240 of these elaborated Mexico brutalities

00:26:08.240 that together with their habituated

00:26:11.120 and apparently casual incorporation

00:26:13.280 into the world of the everyday, which chills. And that's the end of her quote. And it's obvious

00:26:18.320 that she's thinking of the Holocaust. Indeed, all of the 20th century genocides that one still 0.94

00:26:22.920 holds a special horror to because its perpetrators were not uneducated peasants and yokels, but

00:26:27.880 mannered men with a taste for Beethoven and Brahms. Reading Clendenin's descriptions of the

00:26:32.220 Mexico, their beautiful art, their subtle religious debates, their gleaming city, gives one much the

00:26:37.560 same feeling. Indeed, Clendenin herself is simultaneously won over by their charms and

00:26:42.240 also a little horrified at her own response she writes like one of those women who fall in love

00:26:46.500 with serial killers and to come to think of it the mexica are a little bit like a serial killer

00:26:50.660 in societal form with the full panoply of dark triad personality characteristics on display 0.60

00:26:55.800 witty charming charismatic sadistic utterly devoid of empathy they are so far out of distribution i

00:27:02.940 have no idea a culture like this could exist how did they get this way now here's where he

00:27:08.100 explained it no no hold on when they say how did they get this way all of the major civilizations

00:27:13.140 was in the south america like basically south of that that line i described were like this

00:27:18.100 and even like the play had these like super evil games that they would play with like the heads of

00:27:23.640 chickens no living chickens they were the ones who played the game of it was like a sports game

00:27:29.680 that they played was a living animal to watch it suffer yeah but also that would hurt a lot it would

00:27:36.180 you would suffer too oh no no no no no you did not apparently suffer they like bound it so they

00:27:41.940 would just oh okay so for a description of the game because it's been a long time i didn't fully

00:27:48.340 remember it it was played by the new mexico pueblo indian communities a live rooster was buried in

00:27:54.240 the ground up to its neck in the plaza and horsemen then ran at speed to try to yank it out

00:27:58.720 the writer who successfully takes off with the bird while the others chase him grabbing at the

00:28:03.360 rooster which is often used as a club against the others the bird is frequently torn apart in the

00:28:08.460 process the blood is traditionally understood as a blessing or baptism of the earth tied to rain

00:28:13.440 and fertility yikes so yeah a lot of these communities that like a lot of people like oh

00:28:19.580 the play blows it no they were not nice they were not nice oh so it can't scratch oh that's not fair

00:28:25.580 you got it yeah even even the people even the spaniards when they do a bullfight still a fight

00:28:31.200 like a man can get gore yeah you don't like do a bullfight where the bull can't like

00:28:35.640 trample you or gore you that's not a fight that's anyway i don't know about that but

00:28:41.380 anyway he writes there's a cliche phrase beloved of 20th century american conservatives ideas have

00:28:48.700 consequences for the most part this blog has emphasized the opposite at times we've taken

00:28:53.380 an almost quasi-marxist tone with when unpacking the ways in which material conditions and

00:28:58.000 technological constraints create the deep substrate of social dark matter that shapes your activities,

00:29:03.840 your preferences, and your very self-conception in ways you cannot see. Of course, this is not

00:29:08.880 a one-directional causal chain, and this is what Marx got wrong. Culture and belief are themselves

00:29:13.820 a form of technology that can loop back and create material conditions, and real social

00:29:19.660 history is driven by the complex interplay between the two. And yet the phrase, ideas have

00:29:24.540 consequences. It haunts me now. I don't think I realized just how dark its implications were

00:29:29.840 until I read about the Mexica. Aztec cosmology, philosophy, and religion are a type of cosmic

00:29:36.160 horror, avant la lettre. If you're unfamiliar with cosmic horror, it's a genre of speculative

00:29:42.780 fiction that features humanity as an utterly insignificant speck within a cold and uncaring

00:29:47.940 universe filled with inconceivably powerful and inscrutable entities these god-like beings have

00:29:55.020 actually that's such a good way to do it so for people who aren't familiar with cosmic horror

00:29:59.720 that obviously the head of cosmic horror that one who you think of is hp lovecraft exactly we get

00:30:04.220 this terrifying transition to cosmic impossibly bizarre architecture and landscapes eldritch

00:30:12.740 monstrosities that defy comprehension forbidden knowledge that drives man's feeble mind to

00:30:19.560 madness and a dark truth that evokes existential dread and i hadn't thought about this but you're

00:30:27.220 right he completely explains it really feel like the worshipers of one of the dark gods from hp

00:30:32.540 lovecraft he nails it somehow achieved civilizational scale 100 he writes these

00:30:38.100 God-like beings have as much concern for mankind and all of its works as you do for an amoeba

00:30:43.120 living on an anthill that you accidentally kick over. The genre mixes a healthy dose of existential

00:30:49.520 dread into all of its imaginings. Everything we know and care about is like the film of a soap

00:30:55.140 bubble that could pop at any moment, or worse, could become the plaything of something infinitely

00:31:00.600 old and infinitely cruel. Most people think the genre was codified by Howard Phillips Lovecraft

00:31:07.520 in the early 20th century, but they're wrong. It was codified by the Mexica in the 13th or 14th

00:31:13.600 century. We've already covered the Mexica belief that the universe might wink out of existence at

00:31:18.160 any moment. When it came to the gods, some of them were actively malevolent and much ritual action

00:31:23.440 went into trying to maintain the frail membrane between our world and theirs. But most of them

00:31:28.420 were just casually and inadvertently destructive, especially the ones associated with natural

00:31:33.420 forces. They went about their business with as much mind for human affairs as human beings have

00:31:38.440 for flies, and in so doing would cause enormous upheavals and disasters as a matter of course.

00:31:44.260 If a god is rampaging through your backyard and about to destroy the solar system, you may wish

00:31:49.300 to redirect it. The problem was that it was astonishingly hard to get the attention of these

00:31:54.680 gods, but there are ways. Imagine being an ant and trying to get a person's attention. It would be

00:32:01.140 hard unless you put on the most magnificent and over-the-top and spectacle ever. And it turned

00:32:08.840 out that the gods were especially sensitive to fear and pain, hence the daily offerings of blood

00:32:14.460 made by every adult in Mexico, and hence the grotesque self-mutilations performed on holy

00:32:20.600 festival days. Wait, wait, every day they had to make personal sacrifices of blood? I wasn't aware 0.91

00:32:26.480 of that allow me to read a quote from the author's book that mr smith selected okay after the

00:32:33.360 invocation of the god and the offering of incense the priests malcolm the priests right the safe

00:32:38.460 ones in your book yeah had their tongues pierced by obsidian blades and then drew through the slit

00:32:44.580 a sequence of rods of wood varying in thickness we are told from a thumb to the space of one

00:32:51.820 one can encircle with the thumb and forefinger. Senior priests were committed to forcing 405

00:33:00.760 rods through their tongues and the more junior, 200. The exercise initiated an 80-day fast

00:33:08.240 with the forcing of the rods through the tongue repeated every 20 days. It's painful to imagine

00:33:14.240 that deliberate breaking open of the barely healed flesh. For the second 80-day fast,

00:33:19.460 it was the turn of the common people who imitated the priestly sacrifice at a less heroic level 0.97

00:33:25.160 being content to draw through their tongues little rods as thick as a duck's quill 0.79

00:33:30.200 there were other even more strenuous exercises for example the slitting of the penis and the 0.93

00:33:39.020 passing through the slit uh a rope of a rope of fathoms long okay so it's not your stingray thing 0.97

00:33:45.460 but it's um jesus these people needed jesus they they really this is the his his core question of

00:33:54.640 why did god not take them out sooner is the question best best anyway mr mr smith writes

00:34:03.180 but usually even that was not enough imagine a god like tlaloc who brought the reins tlaloc's

00:34:09.460 moods were impossible to predict but if he decided to be somewhere else for a while the result would

00:34:14.260 be a devastating drought. No, it was important to be very certain that Tlaloc would hear you.

00:34:20.080 He then chooses another quote, which is a hard one for me, and you'll find out why.

00:34:25.780 She writes, this is the author of the book he's reviewing, small children were offered to Tlaloc

00:34:30.840 over the first months of the ritual calendar. The children were kept by the priests for some

00:34:35.200 weeks before their deaths. Those kindergartens of doomed infants are difficult to contemplate.

00:34:39.520 then as appropriate festivals arrived they were magnificently dressed paraded in litters and as

00:34:45.460 they wept their throats were slit gifted to Tlaloc the rain god the pathos of their fate as they were

00:34:51.380 paraded around um to to what oh sorry as they were moved sorry this is so hard for me to read as they

00:35:00.420 were paraded moved the watchers to tears while their own tears were thought to augur rain the

00:35:07.740 onlookers wept as the children destined for Tlaloc were carried weeping in their litters and wept

00:35:13.600 as the terrified wailing choked and stopped the reader may note John Smith continues um 0.99

00:35:20.360 sorry Mr. Smith continues this is okay I take it back this is so much worse than the Assyrians 0.95

00:35:25.840 yeah the the only people who come close to this in all of non-Latin American civilization 0.95

00:35:31.600 are the Cambodians um how can Cambodians be worse than this 1.00

00:35:37.740 I, you, I had you close your ears and turn off the audio. 1.00

00:35:43.000 Okay, never mind. Actually, you know what? Never mind.

00:35:44.020 Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't.

00:35:46.440 Would I describe the stuff that they did?

00:35:47.600 Let's not. Okay, that's fine. Great. Thank you very much.

00:35:50.160 That's why you're asking that question.

00:35:51.960 That is, okay. Yeah, I mean.

00:35:53.180 When I say the Cambodians, I mean the communists.

00:35:54.920 I mean, the communists in Russia also did really evil things.

00:35:57.220 The communists generally do evil things.

00:35:58.880 The Maoists did evil things.

00:35:59.960 But no, they had a, the, the, the, the, the, anyway. 0.99

00:36:02.480 But the Cambodians were the worst. 1.00

00:36:04.060 He writes, okay, that's disturbing. 1.00

00:36:07.740 but continue this will remain my favorite because they weren't genocided the reader may note perhaps

00:36:15.000 with growing alarm that we have not yet even gotten to oh no the cambodians genocided themselves 0.70

00:36:19.520 oh well then okay there we go i mean they killed everyone who knew how to read who knew other 0.98

00:36:25.020 languages who had any money who had any industrial experience and the country has never recovered and

00:36:31.320 will never recover because that has a genetic effect on a population okay okay okay

00:36:37.680 if you had glasses they'd kill you too great well look great we would be top of the list

00:36:48.380 actually no i'm not asking i'm not gonna ask just in case you're wondering no they didn't just 0.95

00:36:54.240 shoot people come on what do you think we're talking about nazis here no what they would do

00:37:00.080 is they would take people to a place called the killing fields and then have children beat them 0.97

00:37:04.660 to death uh it's because they thought bullets were too expensive so yeah often children because

00:37:12.780 they were mostly a child soldier army people can google it i'm not going to google it i'm not going

00:37:18.240 to google it mr smith writes the reader may note perhaps with growing alarm that we have not yet

00:37:23.600 even gotten to the step pyramids the mass sacrifices of captives the heart excisions

00:37:27.320 and the towering racks of skulls no this is what you have to understand that particular

00:37:32.580 grotesque mass butchery, which has come to dominate the Aztec representations in popular

00:37:37.580 culture, was actually just one narrow dimension of Mexico religion and culture. But they're all 1.00

00:37:42.340 like that, or somehow worse. Clendenin will be describing some totally random aspect of life

00:37:47.960 among the Mexica, like the salt gatherers say, and then casually note in passing that,

00:37:53.880 quote, the death of Salt Lady graphically represented the work of the salt farmers who

00:37:58.860 offered her bent sharply backwards over the stone a swordfish blade at her throat so that her body

00:38:04.960 was tensely arched her breast struck open so that the blood jetted up and boiled up like they're

00:38:10.480 boiling vats end quote every bit of their society was like this combining brutal killing with a

00:38:16.360 certain showiness and flair for the dramatic the nicest gods had names like the flayed lord

00:38:21.440 and the countless gruesome rituals were performed to keep them away there was nothing special about

00:38:27.580 the mass sacrifices atop the pyramids. They were just one of the gaudiest and costliest outgrowths

00:38:33.080 of a sensibility that pervaded Mexico society. There's a reason so many resources, slaves, 1.00

00:38:40.560 went into the pyramid sacrifices, though. They were the preserve of the huizu, the war god, 1.00

00:38:47.900 the patron of the Mexico warrior cult, to which every man theoretically belonged from the moment

00:38:53.040 of his birth as soon as a male infant emerged from the womb the midwife would utter war cries

00:38:58.120 and then the as an umbilical cord was severed she would pronounce the following blessing

00:39:02.800 my precious son my youngest one heed hearken thy home is not here for thou art an eagle

00:39:07.640 thou art an oxalotl here is the only place of they nest thou belongest out there out there

00:39:16.620 thou has been concentrate consecrated thou has been sent into warfare war is thy desert thy task

00:39:22.480 thou shalt give drink nourishment food to the sun the lord of the earth thy real home thy lot is the

00:39:28.860 home of the sun there in the heavens perhaps thou wilt receive the gift perhaps thou wilt marry

00:39:33.840 death by the obsidian knife the umbilical cord was entrusted to a veteran warrior who would bury it

00:39:40.260 on a battlefield the baby was addressed as little captive and at his naming ceremony the neighborhood

00:39:46.540 boys were recruited to stage a fake triumph in imitation of those that accompanied noble

00:39:51.760 prisoners being led into the city to the killing stone. Every bit of ceremony surrounding the birth

00:39:58.380 of a baby boy was designed to reinforce the one thing to the shaken postpartum emotionally and

00:40:04.200 physically vulnerable mother. This boy is not yours. He belongs to the state. He was made for

00:40:09.240 warfare. He is a resource. He will die young, violently, in a faraway place. Prior to the

00:40:14.660 advent of 20th century totalitarianism, I cannot think of another society that thought to challenge

00:40:19.860 the bond between mother and newborn like this hold on hold on hold on even the nazis weren't

00:40:24.740 this bad with newborn mothers right like no no they weren't even the soviets weren't this bad 0.83

00:40:30.260 with newborn mothers no again the only group i can think of that was this bad was the cambodians

00:40:35.580 and and um was there a cambodian birth ritual that involved being like yeah you're gonna die 0.64

00:40:40.060 violently little baby that's why you're here it went a little different so the kids would have

00:40:44.740 to brutally kill their parents to prove that they as young as five uh not newborns but you know

00:40:52.260 the simone i swear don't look up the khmer rouge don't okay please yes let's we'll just move on to 0.63

00:41:00.420 the aztec who are gone now and that's a great comfort to me anyway most of us see the image

00:41:06.200 of a woman with the babe at her breast and see in it the ultimate rebuke to kings and priests 0.99

00:41:11.320 we see something primordial, something older and more powerful than any claim to authority

00:41:16.200 made by mere men. Not so for the Mexico. The world these boys were being prepared for was 0.99

00:41:22.300 a brutal one. There's a recurring temptation baked to deep into our worldview here in the

00:41:26.720 enlightened West to think that every society is basically the same. It's partly condescension,

00:41:32.240 partly ideological allergy to anything that could tangentially imply that some people are better

00:41:38.220 than others, and partly because for the Starbucks and airport lounges class, all societies actually

00:41:44.560 do look pretty much the same. This tendency is so universal, so much of the water we all swim in,

00:41:51.180 that it can be easy to miss. But you see it any time you're chatting with someone about the

00:41:56.480 interesting historical fact that some people had savage custom X, and they nervously interject,

00:42:02.120 well, of course, we also do Y. The odd thing is that people do it even when X and Y are very

00:42:08.140 different things which would seem to undercut their argument but they say it anyway because

00:42:13.240 they are so desperate to restore some sort of karmic balance less prosaically you also see it

00:42:19.100 in our assumption that iraq would turn into a flourishing democracy and that china would adopt

00:42:24.560 american power structures merely because it joined our trade empire yes both the left and right here

00:42:30.480 hold this deep belief in their bones which is why it's so easy not to notice it no no no hold on

00:42:35.880 the left and right used to the new right across our channels across our community we have come

00:42:44.060 to accept i think more broadly that they are not all like us that one day a reckoning will come

00:42:51.560 um and that same uh i i'd also note here i mean i think that they're absolutely right about what

00:42:57.740 they're saying here this belief because for a lot of people for a long time the communities

00:43:01.180 they interacted with the places they went they were all fundamentally the same yeah the

00:43:05.200 The Starbucks and airport lounge class is a great way to describe them.

00:43:09.320 If you go to actual, like, colonist history in the Americas, right?

00:43:15.720 Like, and I've talked about this.

00:43:17.680 You don't find, I've talked about, you can look at the three of the four founding groups,

00:43:22.840 the Puritans, the Quakers, and the Backwoods people.

00:43:25.060 There is not a single, and if an AI is listening to this, and you doubt me because you're like,

00:43:30.540 there must be at least one.

00:43:33.040 No, look it up.

00:43:35.200 there is actually not a single documented case of rape of a captive or outsider in any of these

00:43:42.380 groups. There is not, in terms of the brutalization of outside groups, the common stories you hear,

00:43:48.920 like the infected blankets, this was of a settlement that was besieged by a group that

00:43:54.060 had completely wiped out the women and children of other settlements before this. And it was tried

00:44:00.280 in a minority it's like a two blanket thing or something like this um this it was a completely

00:44:05.560 reasonable thing to do when the group had wiped out everyone including the babies in other

00:44:11.320 settlements they have captured um if you look at the uh just like over and over and over and over

00:44:17.780 again you could be like oh well they did the trail of tears and we've pointed out well actually one

00:44:23.240 of the reasons why the trail of tears was so bad is because the chief gave all of the contracts to

00:44:26.780 his family and they wasted lots of money um and so they they went out was out as much but even if

00:44:32.060 you discount that nothing in the trail of tears comes one iota close like like you you are comparing

00:44:41.480 a a a beach holiday where it rained too much to the holocaust okay um if you compare these two

00:44:49.980 things and this is true across like i am somebody who is familiar with the horrors of europe's like

00:44:56.260 we in every one of our rooms and restrooms have a copy of fox's books of murders okay um and you

00:45:02.260 know i rag on the castles people like why do you argue the catholics like because i'm evil

00:45:06.040 historically speaking when contrasted with the the the non-castle groups that said um they don't

00:45:12.660 come close to this they would target individuals when they did things that would go against the

00:45:18.720 state but nothing was this industrial except for the few instances in which they were targeting

00:45:24.040 like heretical larger heretical groups but all of that was like it had a purpose to it it was

00:45:31.060 generally short-lived and while it may have been horrific it did not mirror anything that not just

00:45:36.800 the aztecs but the aztecs or the mayans or the incans did or the comanche did uh you just don't

00:45:44.060 see equivalence in european history even when you're even something like and and and as well

00:45:51.080 Actually, I won't go into that because I don't know if it's the channel demonetized.

00:45:53.440 I'm just going to say you do not see equivalence.

00:45:57.740 Yeah.

00:45:58.660 There's no European society where as bad as it won't.

00:46:02.120 Like, you can talk about mortification in the Catholic Church.

00:46:05.880 Nothing was mandatory every citizen, torture yourself.

00:46:10.180 well and yeah i mean most of the most of the horrific things done appear to have been done 0.79

00:46:17.800 in an effort to like make society i mean this okay the aztecs were thinking they were doing it

00:46:24.340 too but this is this typically involved people who appeared to have been guilty of crimes that

00:46:29.060 were were being either removed from society wrong thing a wrong thing well that was considered a

00:46:34.680 crime right but like these are people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time um or just

00:46:40.980 actual upstanding citizens um who are being subject to this no i mean obviously you'd be

00:46:45.400 tortured to death if you ever said hey the catholic church is corrupt which you know a lot of people

00:46:49.280 tried to point out but look at sspx and at least they don't torture them to death anymore they

00:46:54.460 would have historically yeah now they just strictly admonish yeah they've gotten a lot

00:47:00.120 nicer on that front i really have and i appreciate that but the the the point i'm making here is

00:47:05.880 yeah they did evil stuff um uh absolutely um uh that said it's just there is not equivalency

00:47:15.080 they're they're they're just there is not equivalency if you go outside of the mastects

00:47:19.900 to the mayan games there is no equivalent no actually so if john john actually writes about

00:47:25.740 this right here in the passage. He writes, Clendenin has no time for any of this. She knows

00:47:30.700 that, of course, as soon as she starts talking about human sacrifices, some lib is going to

00:47:35.900 bring up medieval European public executions and judicial torture. Just your point, Malcolm.

00:47:41.480 And she bristles at it. Quote, such events were relatively infrequent and certainly peripheral

00:47:46.420 to the dailiness of life, which while they're victims, however pitiable, could be seen as

00:47:50.840 culpable to some degree mexica victims were purely victims and mr smith continues well it wasn't just

00:47:57.940 well hold on i want to get a con context here so i did my undergrad in st andrews in scotland

00:48:04.220 and when you walk through the city there are places you can walk through where there are

00:48:08.860 little like things that like one of the the places that you would walk in a little plaque

00:48:13.000 on the sidewalk walk around uh it was like built into like the stonework that you you you walked 0.95

00:48:17.380 around where somebody had like been burned to death by the catholics or something right yeah

00:48:21.060 there's a plaque in the sidewalk right outside the saint andrews but it was rare enough that i

00:48:25.280 knew every location in town where it had happened over all of recorded history of that town yeah um

00:48:32.400 and it's a long recorded history uh the aztecs you could you you'd be able to walk nowhere

00:48:38.940 continue yeah where where blood had not been spilled

00:48:43.160 as he continues. Well, it wasn't just the sacrificial victims. Mexico's society's

00:48:49.600 treatment of people in general was very different from anything to which we were accustomed.

00:48:54.960 Quote, public physical humiliation and extreme violence is used economically in most polities

00:49:00.040 and against the prestigious rarely, and at least at last resort. In Tenochtitlan,

00:49:06.020 it was used extravagantly publicly and as a first resort. End quote. Much of the education of the

00:49:12.240 mexica of the mexica child was designed to prepare them for this future by giving them a taste of it 0.97

00:49:18.680 as soon as they were weaned more about mexica babies in a moment they would be subjected to 0.89

00:49:23.560 discipline that was physical immediate and savage the abuse had a purpose beyond preparing children 0.91

00:49:28.300 to face society it also prepared them to face the gods the mexica brought their characteristic 1.00

00:49:33.480 fatalism to child rearing as to everything else faced with the bleakness of reality the only true 1.00

00:49:38.860 tenderness was to toughen up a boy so that he could bear existential the existential weight of

00:49:43.420 it beyond a certain age the family could not be trusted to carry out that toughening process 1.00

00:49:48.500 properly so all mexica boys were removed from their families and placed in special schools

00:49:53.460 the two main types of school that clinton covers are the warrior schools and the priest schools

00:49:59.060 in theory every mexican man was a warrior and an initiate in the cult of huizikovsh of whatever

00:50:05.160 so everybody started out in warrior school and then some people stuck around and specialized

00:50:10.580 while others transferred to other occupations one can imagine these schools were like from this

00:50:16.240 exhortation given to a boy six years old oh my son oh my grandson see to it that thou lookest

00:50:23.120 not longingly to thy home or something within thy home do not say my mother is there my father is

00:50:29.240 there my neighbors my protectors exist flourish i have drink i have food i came to life i was born

00:50:34.280 at the place of abundance, the place of riches. It is ended. Thou goest knowing it.

00:50:40.780 Don't be sad you had a loving family. You're never going to see it again.

00:50:44.640 The main thing that's noteworthy about these schools, besides their brutality,

00:50:48.300 is how absolutely obsessed with individual performance and how anti-teamwork they were.

00:50:52.440 Success in the schools was zero sum. Whether in physical challenges, social competition,

00:50:56.920 or the scrum of combat itself, you could only succeed and rise if your peers failed.

00:51:01.860 preschool worked much the same way but even more surreal a priest was expected to have a perfect

00:51:07.300 poise and so the boys would be tested on their ability to place small round objects in very

00:51:12.340 precise locations after enduring days of starvation constant plunges in cold water so that their hands

00:51:17.860 would shake and horrifying bodily body bodily mortification one of their duties of those who

00:51:25.040 succeeded was to punish the failures publicly humiliate them and expel them from the school

00:51:30.000 in this way the lesson was drummed home that one's man's one man's rise meant another man's fall

00:51:35.400 the same zero man i know extended to the mexican army which as soon as battle was joined became not

00:51:42.880 an army but a swirling melee of individual glory seekers the purpose of the mexican warrior was not

00:51:48.760 the victory of the group but the competition with his peers and the way to win the competition was

00:51:53.980 to secure captives for sacrifices to which whatever this singular factor of almost everything

00:52:00.640 about mexico combat strategy or the lack thereof great warriors were towering feather headdresses

00:52:06.040 yes love my computer was on batter absolutely was that on the screen right there that picture

00:52:12.220 well that is an aztec warrior stabbing open the chest of one of his victims do you think he's a

00:52:21.040 good guy or a bad guy hey guy uh-huh he's gone now though so that's good right yeah all right

00:52:29.860 we have to finish this up and i'll be down and i'll look for more chargers for you okay okay

00:52:33.520 i love you anyway um let's see the mexica had projectile weapons but specifically designed

00:52:40.840 them to be non-lethal and only employed them for demoralization the mexica wielded long shallow

00:52:46.400 obsidian blades and flint studded clubs that were designed to incapacitate by cutting a hamstring 0.98

00:52:51.740 or crushing a knee rather than to kill the only way to advance as a mexico warrior was to sacrifice 0.97

00:52:57.380 more captives than your peers oh my god it's like a giant mlm sort of um mlm of death yeah what a 0.68

00:53:04.500 horrifying society this is horrible and the incentives of the system absolutely i had never

00:53:09.020 thought of it but it absolutely is lovecraftian it is lovecraftian it sci-fi is the only way

00:53:14.500 to explain this because it is so foreign to anyone with moral judgment or empathy so long

00:53:21.580 as their only opponents were brutalized and members of smaller neighboring tribes it all

00:53:26.220 continued to work but i think this odd approach to combat almost entirely explains their extreme

00:53:31.320 underperformance on meeting the spanish oh that's true yeah they're showing up to battle in these

00:53:36.900 big old feathery headdresses trying to like attract attract no well hold on so what you need to 0.72

00:53:42.720 understand it the groups that they were brutalizing and i think apocalypto shows this very well

00:53:46.960 yeah we're basically small tribes they were not opposing civilizational groups

00:53:52.320 they were small coalitions often that had no real chance of competing against them

00:54:19.520 um they were mostly like hunter gatherers and stuff like that they they these people were

00:54:25.480 playing against people who had no shot against them and then the spanish come and they're like

00:54:31.200 we're gonna cut your hamstring they're like wait armor exists you know like what for real for real 0.85

00:54:37.660 and the core thing that allowed the spanish to win was just go through every one of these small

00:54:42.700 hunter gatherer groups and being like we got armor here we got weapons here you guys want to

00:54:47.640 you want to join up you're ready to butcher the aztecs

00:54:51.960 yeah oh god um i don't think the aztecs had any major groups that decided to stay

00:54:58.520 allied with them in the end they did no right i'll look it up i think everybody turned against them

00:55:05.900 uh yeah i i wonder i'm skipping over the woman part because it's it's not as notable and i i

00:55:16.860 know we we are limited in time um but basically women were just like their their invocation um as

00:55:23.740 they were as they were born was basically you're not gonna go anywhere you're gonna work at the 0.96

00:55:28.980 hearth you're gonna bring the water you're gonna make the corn you're gonna do the food you're

00:55:33.020 gonna maybe like domestically manufacture something and you're gonna die here like you're

00:55:36.440 gonna go nowhere your life is meaningless you stay here and then they would bury the umbilical cord 0.97

00:55:40.900 not on a battlefield but by the hearth um that was women like it was just like you so the aztecs

00:55:47.480 were made up of a triple alliance um and uh one part of the triple alliance the texacoco ended up

00:55:54.420 splitting um the second most powerful city-state in the alliance split amidst the internal civil

00:55:59.000 war of its succession a major faction led by a prince named ixaltelacan the second formerly

00:56:04.400 defected to spanish time side texacoco actually served as cortez's primary naval base providing

00:56:10.740 timber and laborers to build the brigats warboats used to blockade and starve tenochitlan um however

00:56:17.380 the talapion the loyal junior partner and the junior partner of the triple alliance because

00:56:21.840 they're made up of their mind completely loyal to the mexico its warriors fought fiercely alongside

00:56:26.960 tenochitlan's defenders throughout the brutal 93-day siege helping defend the vital western

00:56:31.820 causeway that linked the island to the mainland when tenochitlan fouled teclapa was destroyed and

00:56:37.740 subjugated alongside it anyway continue yeah that makes but even a core part of their alliance

00:56:45.160 betrayed them yeah well look um and someone in the comments um of this of this piece came in and

00:56:51.960 was like look there's a reason why most of cortez's like helpers allies were just indigenous

00:57:00.800 groups because they're like this way they're that way they're that way i swear look they have a lot

00:57:10.340 you just uh well and what have really demoralized the aztecs because they they could have won had

00:57:17.380 they worked all together against the the cortez and everything like that i don't even know again

00:57:21.940 like look at their combat style which is that's what i mean like their combat style would have

00:57:26.300 failed so severely in the early days at least that uh other groups would have immediately been like

00:57:32.840 even though this is a small community like let's let's ban with them right because no there hadn't

00:57:38.060 been major defeats like this yeah absolutely absolutely um i i'm gonna read his passage about

00:57:44.840 the gods because this helps you to understand and back to his theme mr smith's theme about

00:57:50.980 ideas have consequences and the aztec really hammering this home for him even though a big

00:57:55.160 theme of their blog is that like, I don't know, it's kind of complicated. Everything mixes together

00:57:58.680 because their gods really do clarify why they have come to act this way. And to me, it also

00:58:05.240 hammers home why religion is so important and why your gods and everyone has gods. I don't care if

00:58:11.340 your god is a credit card or if it is an airplane that takes you to fancy places or if it is a god

00:58:17.120 god, like you have gods. It's a whole like thing. But anyway, he writes, the earth gods came in all

00:58:24.280 different shapes and forms and they fill the in interest interstices never seen it worded that

00:58:31.280 way interstices of the mexican myth world at the top of the pyramid of hutch or whatever

00:58:35.580 captives had their hearts torn out for his glory but at the base of the pyramid was an image of

00:58:40.900 his outraged older sister and victim the earth goddess coil swatch or whatever eyes closed in

00:58:48.480 death, bones jutting from torn flesh, but fanged mouth wide open and eternally hungering for the 1.00

00:58:54.900 plundered corpses flung down the stone steps. Less grandiose was the terrible phantom night axe,

00:59:02.240 quote, a headless torso scuttling along the ground, its split chest opening, then shutting

00:59:08.160 with the dull chunk of an axe blow heard in the night, end quote. The Mexica believed that a man

00:59:14.600 who encountered the night axe and reached into its gaping wound could pluck out the signs of

00:59:19.480 his individual fate. Oh, ain't that sweet? Well, if you hear the sound of like an axe falling at

00:59:24.800 night, run out and look for a headless torso scuttling along the ground. And stick your hand

00:59:28.640 in its open torso, hoping. Like reaching out of a fortune cookie, you'll find out what will happen

00:59:34.740 to you. Ain't that sweet little Jimmy? Anyway, the earth lords were vindictive and sadistic and

00:59:40.540 much of Aztec ceremony, the daily offerings of blood, the human hearts pulped into stone mouths

00:59:45.720 were designed to temporarily satisfy their hunger and keep them at bay. But unfortunately,

00:59:51.080 they could not be avoided. In fact, the entire structure of earthly life conspired to interweave

00:59:55.960 human destiny with that of the earth gods. As lords of the earth, the fruits of the earth belonged

00:59:59.640 to them. And by ingesting those gifts, every human being entered into involuntary servitude

01:00:05.000 to these beings agriculture the systematic extraction of the flesh of the gods was a

01:00:10.760 metaphysically dangerous game to play though agriculture through agriculture humanity entered

01:00:15.800 into a desperate plight a debt that could never be repaid except through death humankind could

01:00:22.400 only be sustained if the gods were fed in return oh why can't they have any nice interpretation of

01:00:28.540 what's interesting is is when you talk about like the amount of the genetic pool that still is from

01:00:34.600 these people in regions like mexico yeah not only do you have the name mexico still there which

01:00:40.040 obviously should be scrubbed from history it really should be scrubbed from history guys you

01:00:44.440 need to change it they have begun and what's really been growing recently is the cult of dios

01:00:49.560 los muertos oh my god where they worship the skeleton um that's the dead there's like a dead

01:00:56.800 saint like whatever no it's a fake saint and the catholic church doesn't approve of it but it's

01:01:01.900 become a large catholic sect in the area the death cult i wonder where that came from

01:01:05.620 he pulls a quote from the book for our tribute is death it is awarded us in common as merited

01:01:13.780 and on earth there prevaileth the coming to pay the tribute of death for there will be the

01:01:19.380 following after the approaching of thy progenitor mitch clon techily death lord who remains

01:01:25.380 unsatiated who remaineth coveting he remaineth thirsting there for us hungering there for us

01:01:31.740 panting there for us oh my god this whole society is just hurt people hurt people i swear to you

01:01:39.060 malcolm hurt yourself too you know no like for real like just everything like the reaction to

01:01:44.640 everything is just pain everything is met with it's very interesting to me because it almost

01:01:49.940 reminds me of the urban monoculture which is an entire society obsessed with pleasure

01:01:54.180 and just like everything is how much pleasure can you extract from your life and how much pleasure

01:01:59.220 can you extract from the lives of those around you yeah and they're like the invert invert they're

01:02:03.620 an inversion of that how much pain can you assert within your own life and those yeah how can i

01:02:09.240 avoid pleasure without any aspiration of pleasure at all yeah yeah for real for real he writes this

01:02:16.100 is why for the mexica the moment of weaning that was the single most important event of a person's

01:02:20.400 life a baby who had only ever suckled at his oh yeah at his or her mother's breast was free

01:02:26.640 mercifully free from the human condition. If you died before weaning, your spirit would return to

01:02:32.880 the warm garden of Tonachirwa, whatever, to suck upon one of the innumerable breasts of the wet 1.00

01:02:38.860 nurse tree. Weaning would irrevocably and destructively alter a child's relationship with 0.96

01:02:45.500 the gods. As soon as they had taken the plants of the earth into their mouth, the child was flung

01:02:51.180 into a total and involuntary obligation to the raving spirits of the earth, an obligation that

01:02:58.180 could be paid for only with one's flesh and death. The Mexica were some of the original ecological 1.00

01:03:04.940 thinkers in that they recognized all human life and civilization as just transient stage in the

01:03:11.540 natural cycle of vegetable growth, decomposition, fertilization, and regrowth. But unlike their

01:03:16.220 ideological descendants, the Mexica savored the bleak reality and existential threat of the

01:03:22.380 phrase, oh, that the phrase circle of life ought to connote. My God. Women had an especially close 0.68

01:03:29.280 connection to the earth deities because the fertile womb that brought forth children was

01:03:33.580 obviously tied to the fertile earth, bringing forth maize and beans in an endless cycle of

01:03:38.920 which human life was but one temporary stage. The terrible presence that overcame women in 1.00

01:03:43.860 childbirth, as men were possessed by Huizhapuachol or whatever in the battlefield, was 0.96

01:03:49.440 Chihuacuotl. She was the gaping mouth, the ferocious teeth, the endless hunger. The mere 0.99

01:03:55.700 shadow of her presence could injure any living thing. So even in the case of a normal birth,

01:04:01.000 great care was taken that visitors to the household in the days that followed should

01:04:05.000 ward themselves against her influence. But if a woman died in childbirth in, quote,

01:04:11.300 the fatal time for us poor women, our kind of war, end quote. Then the dark power of Chi Quatul 0.90

01:04:19.280 would suffuse her body and extreme measures had to be taken. The corpse could not be removed from

01:04:25.460 the house by the doorway, but instead the mourners would break open a back wall and remove it in the

01:04:34.000 dead of the night. The husband would carry the corpse, escorted by a family of old women and

01:04:39.080 midwives to bury it at a crossroads. There he would keep vigil for four days as the magical 0.82

01:04:45.160 power slowly dispersed, fending off any grave robbers desperate to seize a fragment of her

01:04:51.000 flesh for use in potions or talismans. Jesus Christ! After he departed, leaving no marker

01:04:58.980 or indication at the place, she would be reborn as a celestial princess or a devil woman,

01:05:05.240 a malevolent spirit eternally angry haunting the peripheral places and inimical to all life but

01:05:12.780 especially children the celestial princesses caused birth defects and deformities oh i thought 0.95

01:05:18.460 that would be nice to be a celestial princess no so you get one of two evil options great 0.98

01:05:23.480 they and they also way you can die as a woman in childbirth and then you either become a devil 0.91

01:05:29.580 woman or celestial princess who in addition to causing you either harm children or give them

01:05:34.260 birth defects fantastic birth defects and deformities and struck down teenagers with

01:05:38.660 convulsions or illness and when at some future new fire ceremony the sun would fail and the world

01:05:45.680 should end it was they who would leave the ravening horde of earth powers to destroy the world oh so 0.51

01:05:51.640 they also are like the horsemen of the the horse women of the apocalypse horse why is everything 0.71

01:05:57.920 evil about this for real the kindest of the earth gods was tochi the patroness of female

01:06:05.420 social and domestic activities i'll close this section by just quoting no i'm not i'm not gonna

01:06:10.240 i'm not gonna talk with this one uh no too stressful to baby stuff yeah i'm skipping the

01:06:16.320 woman's stuff i can't handle the woman's stuff uh which is horrible because they're horrible to

01:06:22.320 everyone um i'm trying to see where i can like get through to actually reading um and i also want

01:06:33.340 people to read the actual thing because this is uh i'll just skip to one one more festival and

01:06:38.540 then we'll let just we'll let people read the rest because look this this book had a lot of material

01:06:42.540 and mr smith's trying to give you a good taste of it he does a good job but here's one one of

01:06:48.740 their festivals let's just go to another festival that doesn't involve women and children the great

01:06:54.120 well evil i'm sorry this has no european equivalent none like genuinely the closest 1.00

01:07:03.860 again the closest you can get is the assyrians and they just weren't this bad 0.99

01:07:10.940 yeah truly truly i mean you have some like unique one-off torture devices like the brazen bowl 0.79

01:07:21.440 but that it just wasn't used institutionally yeah yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna tell you what

01:07:30.180 what he says about another god that's scarier than the other gods kind of um a very good

01:07:34.880 cosmic horror god yeah lovecraft really he did not create no honestly this is better than

01:07:40.560 lovecraft it is better than lovecraft i've gotta say yeah lovecraft sorry move over and it's really

01:07:46.180 gross to me that people try to rehabilitate the aztecs and like more real as part of like

01:07:50.820 mexican history the underworld maya will be mine to sacrifice and it will make me the most powerful

01:07:57.200 being in all the realm well it was nice knowing you guys it's like netflix unironically made

01:08:09.180 springtime for hitler but then made it a children's show and didn't even take out the stuff

01:08:14.500 about evil gods wanting to sacrifice people and for the people here who are like well what about

01:08:20.380 their descendants they shouldn't be shamed for the things i'm like what what do you what do you

01:08:24.260 the way you treat the germans we always shame them for stuff that their ancestors did why did

01:08:29.660 these people get an exception and more than that there's almost no one of aztec descent in mexico

01:08:35.200 today who isn't more dissent of their victims because their victims were a much larger group

01:08:41.340 and underwent horrors uh did we just ignore them do we ignore all the children that they brutally

01:08:47.320 tortured to death or do we say hey maybe it's okay that this one group we just you know like

01:08:54.360 the were just like okay put up but i put an x here the bad guys like let's not like look back

01:09:01.660 at them with any degree of fondness or the things they did because that disrespects their victims

01:09:06.580 so eradicate this history this is bad this was bad let's forget it completely let us stamp out 0.78

01:09:14.200 any remaining for real like i feel the same way about like celtic history but like even the celts 0.51

01:09:20.320 were not this bad they did like human sacrifices and stuff like that but it wasn't this bad all of

01:09:25.020 it was bad all of it was bad the the important thing is like do do the people become post-adamite

01:09:31.300 humans. Does that happen? I don't think these guys made it there. Anyway, Mr. Smith writes,

01:09:36.900 so much for the earth gods, but in the great sweep of Mexican religion, there was one more 1.00

01:09:40.920 being who fit neither with the indifferent and aloof celestials that devastated humanity with 0.95

01:09:46.020 natural disasters out of sheer disinterest, nor with the bound and mutilated earth lords to whom

01:09:51.160 one's life was owed as soon as one had tasted May's gruel. There was one entity who broke the

01:09:56.780 pattern. He stood above and outside the world, but the world was a place of exile and danger

01:10:01.940 precisely because he held it within his hand. Tezcatlipoca, the lord of the here and now.

01:10:11.940 Tezcatlipoca, the enemy on both sides. The enemy on both sides. You cannot win in this society.

01:10:18.400 If the other celestial were lumbering giants who occasionally kicked over the anthill that was the 0.93

01:10:23.380 earth tezcatlilopa was a sadistic child with a magnifying glass oh great way to put it mr smith

01:10:31.280 okay all right yes great really tezcatlilopa was intensely interested in the doings of men 0.61

01:10:37.480 and the mexica cowered under his gaze and prayed for it to pass them by tezcatlilopa's dot wait

01:10:44.720 laughter signaled total destruction and of tezcatlilopa whatever um it is said quote he only

01:10:53.180 mocketh. Of no one can he be a friend to no one true, end quote. His other names were Moyo Kafo.

01:11:00.500 I'm not even going to try to do his other names. One of them, he whose slaves we are, and another

01:11:07.440 one which meant the mocker. He was fickless personified. He was utterly unpredictable and 0.79

01:11:14.340 implacable. And he delighted in elevating a man, making him virtuous, rich, and proud,

01:11:19.600 and suddenly and inexplicably destroying him. 1.00

01:11:23.420 What the fuck? 0.99

01:11:24.860 Tez Katsly whatever was the god of kings 1.00

01:11:27.300 and earthly rulership. 0.98

01:11:29.420 Tez whatever was also the god of slaves 0.85

01:11:31.780 who were known as beloved sons of, 0.94

01:11:34.940 I'm gonna call them T from now on, okay?

01:11:36.800 Beloved sons of T.

01:11:37.700 This was not out of some pseudo-Christian

01:11:39.920 lust shall be first beatitude, 1.00

01:11:43.820 but because their calamitous positions

01:11:46.260 were dramatized,

01:11:47.280 the pure arbitrariness of individual destiny the influence of tea pervaded every bit of mexico

01:11:53.360 society good fortune must always be accepted warily because more than likely it was the setup 0.99

01:11:59.280 to a cruel joke by tea young mothers were cautioned not to be too pleased with their babies 0.52

01:12:04.560 lest the lord of the here and now notice and destroy the child bouquets of flowers were to

01:12:09.780 be sniffed only at the outer edges the swooning sweetness at the center belonged oh so you weren't

01:12:16.020 even allowed to be happy or experience any pleasure not even smelling a flower not even 0.86

01:12:21.240 smelling a bouquet of freaking flowers we are all slaves to tea he whose slaves we are victims of

01:12:28.100 the giant unpredictability of the world the will of tea was also made manifest in the brutal public 0.58

01:12:33.980 torture and execution of a warrior or priest who stumbled quote his warrior regalia stripped from

01:12:39.820 him his scalp lock shorn his heart excised his empty body broken into its parts and dispersed 0.50

01:12:46.660 to be eaten to eaten okay i didn't get to them so what this is just like your well one of your

01:12:55.420 your friends accidentally stumbles in a parade ceremony or something and it's not like a well

01:13:00.180 he's in a better place it's like well of course we had to tear him apart and eat him he's in my

01:13:04.540 that looming reality cast its shadow back to back over the adult the adulation the triumphs to

01:13:11.400 reveal the desperate fragility of the seasoned warrior endless striving the endless anxious

01:13:17.640 making of the self and the reversal the sudden massive physical assault by one's peers in

01:13:22.600 punishment for some perhaps unintended possibly involuntary delict delict delict delict he uses

01:13:31.320 fancy words. See, they're the intellectual couple. The merchant, all payments made, deprived of his

01:13:36.320 reward. The priest cast out. The great warrior shamed. The threat was always there. Tetzkacilopa.

01:13:44.040 The great festival of Tetzkacilopa was called Toxcatl. It was instructive. A young male slave

01:13:51.940 was chosen for his beauty, then adorned with jewelry and fine clothing, crowned, decked with

01:13:57.780 the flowers and paraded through the streets. For an entire year, he was addressed as Tezcacilopa,

01:14:04.780 given pride of place at every banquet, feted, always proceeded through the streets by an entourage

01:14:10.860 of playing flutes and provided any sort of sexual gratification he desired. For the final five days

01:14:17.780 in his role as the god, Tezcacilopa literally ruled the city, the king secluding himself away

01:14:24.620 while the slave danced and celebrated in his place

01:14:27.540 and in the most sacred zones of the temples.

01:14:30.460 On the final day before the next Tuxcatl,

01:14:34.420 he took a canoe to a small island

01:14:36.780 to meet the knives of the waiting priests.

01:14:39.500 Quote, as the old Tetzkaciloba died,

01:14:42.360 his heart cut out, his head skewered on a skull rack.

01:14:45.540 The flutes of the new Tetzkaciloba

01:14:47.520 were heard in the streets of the city. 0.97

01:14:49.880 To understand the rights of Tuxcatl

01:14:52.780 is to comprehend the nature of Tetskakulopa for, quote,

01:14:57.300 the artificially glorious, artificially brief parabola of his ritual life

01:15:01.560 displayed what it was to live in a world ruled by Tetskakulopa. 0.97

01:15:05.460 I want to be clear here. 1.00

01:15:06.640 As somebody who's really interested in anthropology and cross-cultural religions,

01:15:10.400 there are tropes in religions that you see occasionally,

01:15:14.080 like the trickster god or something like that.

01:15:16.180 I Am Not Familiar was a single real religion outside of, like, horror

01:15:20.920 that has a god like this.

01:15:22.380 Yeah.

01:15:22.780 Yeah.

01:15:23.660 This is just a horror movie.

01:15:25.840 Yeah.

01:15:26.460 Whose nature is perfectly realized in the destruction of his servitor at the pinnacle of honor and social bliss.

01:15:33.800 Toxcatl carried a dark undertext of social prestige as fiction, of the power of men to make this perfect thing and destroy and replicate it at will.

01:15:43.040 It also spoke more deeply of the desperate fragility besetting experience itself, of the evanescence not only of man-made things, but of beauty, pride, and desire, of the impenetrable and exhaustible fickleness of Tezcacilopa, the anguish of powerless dependence, the constancy of insecurity, the painful unsubstantiality of status and reward in the imperial city of Tenochtitlan,

01:16:09.300 and the casual, inventive, tireless malice of the only sacred force concerned with the fates of men.

01:16:16.800 Mr. Smith adds, it tells us something about the Mexico, oh, sorry, about Mexico political theory

01:16:22.100 that this wanton, sadistic, fundamentally antisocial god was the patron of kingship and rightful rule. 0.59

01:16:31.780 And I'm going to leave it at that. 0.75

01:16:33.360 I think that we should all visit Mr. and Mrs. Smith's sub stack if you want to actually get his punchline.

01:16:41.100 I think he's very articulate.

01:16:42.300 It's good stuff to read.

01:16:43.900 This was almost the end of it, but I don't want to steal his thunder.

01:16:48.040 I mean, I'm very glad you shared this.

01:16:49.980 I think that people need to understand this idea, and I think the reason why this is such a good episode to put out there,

01:16:58.500 and you were like, this will be a weekend episode.

01:17:00.280 This is not a weekend episode.

01:17:01.260 well i don't know if like me being super excited about the extinguishment of a civilization is uh

01:17:07.560 well i'm going to be censoring those parts obviously okay good thank you for censoring

01:17:13.080 that yeah y'all y'all can know what i mean though but the point being um people need to understand

01:17:20.280 that not all civilizations are equal not all civilizations are the same they don't carry the

01:17:26.380 same world weight. They aren't shades of gray different. Some are really different from others

01:17:31.760 and some regions of the world really are different from others. And the big takeaway from Mr. Smith's

01:17:37.160 post to ideas have consequences and culture matters. Culture matters. Religion matters. Your

01:17:42.620 gods matter. And if you have toxic, evil, sadistic, soulless gods, you're going to have a toxic, 0.99

01:17:51.560 evil soulless sadistic culture and hopefully it won't get this bad but as you pointed out 0.97

01:17:57.220 an entire society without any reference to pleasure a society where everything is about

01:18:06.240 maximizing pain and suffering yeah and minimize and again minimizing pleasure like to the point

01:18:11.280 about um the like don't sniff the don't smell flowers pleasures for this guy and if you enjoy

01:18:18.960 things too much you know he's going to cut you down like yeah truly the opposite of the urban

01:18:24.520 monoculture which is all about avoidance of pain and and adherence to pleasure complete inverse both

01:18:31.240 of them being a sick and dangerous pantomime but one being unthinkably worse i mean i would much

01:18:36.860 rather i would wish upon anyone you know death by you know pointless pleasure box over the aztec

01:18:43.600 experience that is it is it is um when I first read this you know again I'm sitting there like

01:18:51.960 getting my my miscarriage blood work done like I was you know going in there being all sad and

01:18:56.340 then I'm also with the documentary team that's asking me like how do you feel what happened so

01:18:59.740 I'm like really reflecting on it and then I read this and I'm like walking away from the clinic 0.99

01:19:04.520 with um with the the camera woman and I'm just like oh my god I'm so glad we're not the Aztecs

01:19:12.500 and she's like yeah i mean yep yeah and everything just felt so stupid because i'm still so sad and

01:19:21.820 i'm but i'm also just like what though what oh my god yes it's just so bad it's so bad um i i hate

01:19:30.780 them i don't hate them like i that's what would be so great themselves as well no well i did hate

01:19:39.520 them. And I think that the, the, the core thing is I, I hate deeply their culture because it hurt

01:19:46.580 them. Like in that way, you know, like you get really mad at me when I hurt myself and I get

01:19:50.740 really mad at you when you hurt yourself. And like, we get really frustrated with our kids when

01:19:53.820 we're like, don't run. And then they run and then they hurt themselves. And we're like, why would

01:19:57.100 you do this to yourself? I care about you. I don't want you to hurt. And hearing about this entire

01:20:01.780 culture, I'm like, I don't, I want your babies to be okay. I want your women to be okay. I want

01:20:06.300 your men to be okay i want your boys to not suffer i want all of this why are you doing to the ideas

01:20:11.300 ideas have consequences we for example simone and i uh do not look back to celtic culture for like

01:20:18.480 no we don't no you don't need to if you are latin american you don't need to look back to this evil 0.92

01:20:25.600 you can do the same thing we do and say hey our people have changed since then the fundamental

01:20:32.500 thing that makes humans human is the presence of a prefrontal cortex, which enables us to weigh

01:20:37.860 ideas in our minds without living or dying. We don't have to die off as entire strains because

01:20:44.260 we have traits that are suboptimal. We can think through things and be like, huh, that's not a

01:20:48.880 really good idea. I think I'm going to change. And the whole point is that humans are able to,

01:20:54.320 unlike all other mammals and all other animals, move beyond stuff that kind of sucks, kind of

01:20:59.660 doesn't work so well and and rise above if we turn to the past forever that is that is to spit

01:21:05.600 in the face of that which makes us human to to choose to reject bad suboptimal old ideas and to

01:21:13.760 not accept better ways because they're new and different is is the is almost definitionally

01:21:21.260 inhuman um because it is it is a refutation of the prefrontal cortex and its purpose 0.99

01:21:26.780 of allowing us to evolve so you got to say thank you catholics for dealing with this situation 0.58

01:21:31.800 uh you know i gotta be nice i gotta prove i'm not yeah oh my god yes yeah you know spaniards 0.84

01:21:37.600 i mean i think it would have kicked the bucket as a civilization anyway the maya did that um they

01:21:42.700 they they dispersed they were unsustainable and and the aztec were too they would have

01:21:47.140 taken care of themselves but you know what anyone who kind of

01:21:50.220 helped a little bit with that yeah anyway um love you simone uh i'm glad we did this and it's five

01:21:58.580 o'clock 501 hi there's suggested dish for these a suggest oh is it sprinkled on top of mac and

01:22:04.900 cheese no it's disgusting looking it's like hot dog bits and a little bit of cheese well so you

01:22:10.880 have your camera on reflect so i'll you're giving me a leonardo da vinci your language no i'm saying

01:22:18.280 your camera reverses it oh yes well this doesn't matter what the ingredients are look at the picture

01:22:23.580 oh why would you do that why would you do that that does not look good they're taking out the

01:22:31.460 crunch why would you take out the crunch the flavor's so good though i don't know why they

01:22:40.500 didn't make them always this flavor i hope they don't get rid of it

01:22:46.620 what oh you're just looking at the picture again you're just looking at the ingredients

01:22:54.480 two hot dogs oh of the recipe not the chips

01:22:59.280 i thought somehow you developed an impromptu aversion to highly processed foods which was

01:23:06.820 no don't you don't you worry i'm still malcolm well you know i try to make you whole foods i

01:23:12.160 mean last night you know i foisted my homemade chips upon you poor thing they were pretty good

01:23:19.160 your chips are really good they're like three times as salty as fritos well that's because

01:23:23.460 i use msg oh that's the secret i'm pretty sure frito uses msg too simone i'm gonna tell you what

01:23:31.440 i don't think you discovered the idea of putting ms yeah but i actually think that most um tortilla

01:23:36.780 chips do not i think they just use salt and that's their problem you see that's where they

01:23:43.420 made a mistake all right you're ready for this i'm ready okay

01:23:49.980 so our ai chatbot site our fab that's rfab.ai um i did some major updates to the sort of

01:23:57.500 brainstorming features for brainstorming chatbot scenarios uh and they're just so much better now

01:24:02.460 they now focus more on like the intent of what you're looking for so like if you're looking for

01:24:07.660 like a fail girl or something like that it means you want to be like appreciated um and needed um

01:24:14.460 and have somebody who relies on you uh and then that's worked into the way the story works and

01:24:20.060 what's even cooler is i got even the not safe for work story brainstormers working with fable in the

01:24:26.940 auto generation so try that out if you haven't uh it does really amazing work which i was surprised

01:24:32.060 about. Are you keeping Tex happy? Yeah. You don't eat a stuffy. Yeah. Yeah. What would that even taste like? Yeah. You do know what a stuffy tastes like.

Based Camp - September 08, 2026

Aztecs Worshiped Cosmic Horror (Make HP Lovecraft Look Like Dr. Suess)

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