Based Camp - June 04, 2023


Based Camp： Traditionalism Is Not the Answer


Episode Stats

Length

37 minutes

Words per Minute

170.2887

Word Count

6,394

Sentence Count

353


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Within the conservative movement, there are two factions.
00:00:02.540 There's the traditionalist faction, which is to say, let's just go back to the way things
00:00:06.060 used to be.
00:00:07.000 And then there's the other faction that says, you know, this progressive super virus has
00:00:10.560 screwed everything up.
00:00:12.300 Yet, we need to learn from tradition.
00:00:15.100 We need to harvest truths from tradition, which can help us through this situation,
00:00:21.420 while also understanding that people who blindly cling to traditionalism are likely going to
00:00:26.380 be as swept away by that sands of time as the extremist progressive mind virus zombies.
00:00:33.860 So what I'm getting is, basically, you can't turn back time, remove technology, not really.
00:00:41.000 I mean, if you can try, but there will always be some groups that continue to use it, and
00:00:45.240 they will outcompete you, right?
00:00:47.020 So there is no option to go back to full pure traditionalism, really, with some exceptions,
00:00:54.660 I suppose.
00:00:55.040 Like, you could go Amish and find a niche that kind of works for you, that's symbiotic
00:00:59.660 with society as it progresses.
00:01:02.600 One of the social changes that we're dealing with is humans are becoming increasingly infertile.
00:01:08.220 And you can't outrun infertility with just having sex more often.
00:01:16.220 Not anymore.
00:01:17.040 Not at the levels to which...
00:01:18.520 You're looking at a 50% reduction in sperm count over the past 50 years, over that.
00:01:22.600 You know, a 30% reduction in testosterone rates in, what, the last 20 years or something.
00:01:26.900 Eventually, if the trends can trend you, which everything seems to indicate that they are
00:01:31.600 continuing, humans will become increasingly and increasingly infertile.
00:01:34.940 And the more you hold to IVF bad, you know, because with IVF, you're losing access to some embryos,
00:01:42.500 the more you as a cultural unit are going to struggle against the cultural units that are
00:01:49.360 aggressively using IVF.
00:01:50.940 One, to not only combat this fertility collapse, but also to expand their own fertility windows.
00:01:58.140 That's the core trap of traditionalism, is that it is more effective the more extreme
00:02:04.380 you go with it.
00:02:05.680 Okay.
00:02:05.900 And if effectiveness increases linearly with how extreme you take it.
00:02:10.460 So you are always...
00:02:11.800 So, like, if you talk with, like, a Catholic traditionalist, right?
00:02:14.100 Like, they're actually not that much of a traditionalist.
00:02:16.280 If they were more of a traditionalist, if they moved more, like, on the Amish side of the
00:02:19.620 spectrum, if they disengaged with technology completely, if they went off the grid,
00:02:22.960 they would see a rise in mental health.
00:02:25.040 They would see a rise in fertility rates.
00:02:27.480 They would see a rise in all of the things that show vitality within their culture.
00:02:30.740 Why can't a traditionalist group end up being the group that survives, right?
00:02:35.880 Yes.
00:02:36.300 And the answer is, is because the effectiveness of traditionalism is linearly correlated with
00:02:42.560 how traditionalist you become, with groups like the Amish being the most effective forms
00:02:47.360 of traditionalism.
00:02:48.160 The problem is, is that technology bequeaths you with many advantages, whether they are
00:02:57.060 health advantages or just the advantage of one group having automatic weapons and the
00:03:02.260 other group not having automatic weapons.
00:03:04.700 Being able to produce...
00:03:06.400 Or one group having automated drones and the other group trying to fight those drones with
00:03:11.180 automated weapons.
00:03:12.420 You cannot fight a group that technologically leans in if you're a group that technologically
00:03:17.600 leans out.
00:03:18.580 You can, you can maybe like passively fight them for a bit, but at the end of the day,
00:03:23.520 you always lose.
00:03:25.200 Would you like to know more?
00:03:26.680 Hello, Malcolm.
00:03:27.980 Hello, Simone.
00:03:28.860 It's wonderful to be here with you today.
00:03:31.540 Are you speaking more softly because you are afraid to wake the approaching civilizational
00:03:36.320 collapse?
00:03:38.380 Well, we did, we did have a podcast on that recently and we're going to be talking about
00:03:43.020 it again today.
00:03:44.840 Yeah.
00:03:44.960 So today we are going to talk about the way people react to civilizational collapse.
00:03:52.700 And fortunately, because we've seen civilizational collapses before, we know how it always, it
00:03:59.280 turns out, like the different ways that people react to it.
00:04:02.600 So naturally, civilizational collapse typically looks the same because civilizational peaks look
00:04:09.240 the same.
00:04:09.740 Throughout history, whenever you had a group that was more urban and educated, they were
00:04:18.860 almost always and universally seen as more effete.
00:04:23.580 And sorry for people who don't know what that means, sort of feminine.
00:04:26.700 You saw this in the way that the Romans saw the Greeks, but even if you go further back
00:04:32.780 than that, you can see the way that the people around some of the first cities saw the people
00:04:39.760 in the first cities as very iffy.
00:04:42.460 Maybe the only notable exception of this I can think of is the Assyrians.
00:04:46.600 But we don't even know what their rural populations thought of them.
00:04:51.740 So it could just be an overreaction.
00:04:54.500 Like these could have been, it'd be really funny.
00:04:56.200 The Assyrians are just seen as like wildly effete.
00:04:58.760 And yet we see them as like these overbloody people because they were like a guy having a
00:05:03.060 midlife crisis.
00:05:03.760 Like drawing all this bloody stuff on the wall, like, or like a teenager, like mom, I'm so
00:05:10.300 tougher.
00:05:11.000 This is so harsh.
00:05:12.480 I guess you could argue that some of the Mesoamerican civilizations, like the Mayans might be an
00:05:16.540 exception too.
00:05:17.500 But anyway, generally speaking, and this creates, I think, an illusion for people that is one
00:05:24.480 of the big problems, I think, in how conservative movements today see civilizational collapse is
00:05:29.880 they correctly see that leading up to a collapse, you get higher rates of often LGBT acceptance.
00:05:38.780 You get higher rates of female participation in the workforce.
00:05:42.520 You get higher rates of many things that today are associated with generic progressivism.
00:05:47.540 Of course, the counterfactual here is what is a collapse?
00:05:53.040 It's a decline from a peak of civilization.
00:05:55.640 So all of those things are also things that you see more of at the peak of a civilization
00:06:01.520 than at any of the troughs of a civilization.
00:06:04.920 So it is hard to say that they caused the collapse.
00:06:08.020 However, you know, there does seem to be some evidence, right?
00:06:12.020 You know, you keep seeing this pattern of these things right before the collapse.
00:06:15.660 So they may be correlatory, right?
00:06:18.320 So civilizations regularly go through this cycle where they become more accepting, they become
00:06:25.320 more innovative, and they become more urban.
00:06:28.980 And as a result of that, social institutions change.
00:06:33.640 And it changes the way parents are interacting with their children.
00:06:38.020 It changes the way society interacts with other people.
00:06:40.560 And you begin to see social institutions collapse.
00:06:45.540 This is just like a historic thing.
00:06:46.660 We've seen this multiple times.
00:06:47.540 You saw this was the height of Athens to the fall of Athens.
00:06:49.980 You saw this was the end of the Renaissance.
00:06:51.680 You saw this was the end of Rome.
00:06:54.960 When these collapses happen, there is one natural reaction to them, which is we need to go back
00:07:03.180 to the old ways.
00:07:05.500 And then there's another reaction to it, which is, well, let's look at the social changes
00:07:10.080 that we've had recently and accelerate them to see what comes next.
00:07:15.280 Hold on, though, because I don't think that's true.
00:07:20.600 What gives you reason to believe that there actually has been some attempt at continued
00:07:26.180 adaptation in these civilizational collapse scenarios?
00:07:29.740 Yeah, so continued adaptation.
00:07:32.060 Let's talk about the most classic example of the fall of the Roman Empire.
00:07:36.520 So you had two groups.
00:07:38.160 You had one group that was experimenting with new social technologies and that represented
00:07:42.960 accelerationist or if you're talking about social experimentation, an accelerationist view.
00:07:49.500 And this group was this new religious movement that had recently taken the world by storm.
00:07:57.680 It was the Christians.
00:07:59.140 And then you had the traditionalists who were the pagans and wanted to go back to the old
00:08:03.360 ways of doing things.
00:08:04.500 And the group that survived was the iterations of the Christian church that became harder line,
00:08:14.440 stricter, but not in a traditionalist context, but rather a social invention context.
00:08:21.940 If you're looking for other examples of this during the Norman conquest, there were a number
00:08:27.440 of families in the ruling caste that wanted to flee.
00:08:30.880 So they fled to Byzantium and they said, okay, we're going to maintain our old ways, our old
00:08:36.300 social system.
00:08:37.000 And then other nobles were like, no, let's try to integrate with this new Norman group.
00:08:41.340 Those were the nobles that ended up winning.
00:08:43.380 The ones that were like, okay, let's try to do things a new way.
00:08:46.320 Let's try to work within this new system and adapt it to our means.
00:08:49.460 It was the same with the fall of Rome.
00:08:51.180 With the fall of Rome, the Western Roman Empire, let's be specific here.
00:08:54.600 The groups that survived were the Christian organizations, but the Christian organizations
00:09:00.880 that took intentionality in terms of changing and updating their practices.
00:09:05.260 You know, this is when you had a lot of these councils happening.
00:09:07.900 This is when you had a lot of what today are heresies being codified because there was
00:09:13.540 this idea that, yes, we are new and yes, we are an aggressive social technology movement.
00:09:21.600 However, that doesn't mean we're loosey goosey.
00:09:25.080 And so during a collapse, you can see three large groups form.
00:09:31.440 One is the traditionalists.
00:09:33.820 The other is the people who just go balls to the walls with hedonism in the moment.
00:09:38.920 And hedonism can take many forms.
00:09:40.420 They can take, and this is one of the things that we make clear in other podcasts, the highest
00:09:44.220 form of hedonism is indulging in a personal narrative of suffering and victimhood because
00:09:49.120 that's what people want to be more than anything, because it removes any responsibility from
00:09:53.420 them.
00:09:53.860 You know, that is the luxury of a victim narrative.
00:09:57.720 And then the final group is the accelerationist group.
00:10:00.840 So would you argue that in the scenario of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the
00:10:06.540 Christians, the more hardline Christians, were the adapting to the future facet and that,
00:10:14.420 okay, maybe quote unquote-
00:10:16.200 Yes, their iterations of hardline Christianity weren't like something that had existed before.
00:10:21.300 They were aggressively experimenting with new ways of doing things and new ways of structuring
00:10:28.200 the church.
00:10:29.080 And yeah.
00:10:30.040 So what you're saying then is, to a certain extent, civilizational collapse can be averted,
00:10:36.240 but it will still look like civilizational collapse because that which existed before and which was not
00:10:42.040 working, obviously, does cease to exist and something fairly violently different is going to take its
00:10:49.700 place, right?
00:10:51.000 Yeah, well, I mean, it's about do you accept that the world is changing or do you say we can recreate
00:10:57.820 or recapture what civilization was before?
00:11:02.420 Like the Romans that turned to the old pagan ways during periods of collapsing.
00:11:07.900 And this was actually a big thing.
00:11:09.440 So there was a big flourishing of cults during that time period.
00:11:12.860 And when I say cults, I don't mean cults in the modern derogative sense of the word cults.
00:11:17.020 I mean, like mystery cults and stuff like that.
00:11:20.100 If you're a scholar, you'll know what I'm talking about.
00:11:22.820 Does it matter if the audience knows?
00:11:24.640 No, it doesn't matter.
00:11:25.580 What matters is basically people were participating in old pagan rituals at larger and larger levels.
00:11:34.880 Actually, and this was happening in the same areas that Christianity was spreading during
00:11:38.780 those time periods.
00:11:39.880 So Christianity would spread a lot in the military during those time periods.
00:11:43.380 And the primary competitor to Christianity was these spreading mystery cults that you also had
00:11:50.600 was in the military during this time period.
00:11:52.740 So these groups were directly competing and often in similar sorts of environments.
00:11:57.620 So if we look today, can we say, are there groups today that are responding to what I think of
00:12:03.660 as the beginnings of a civilizational collapse cycle?
00:12:07.320 And we are seeing the cycle.
00:12:08.740 You know, this cycle has happened many times before.
00:12:10.500 And when we say like the goal of our organization, they go, what's the real goal of the perinatalist?
00:12:13.980 It's to ensure that the next civilization doesn't undergo that cycle again, that we create a
00:12:19.140 permanent renaissance.
00:12:20.440 But anyway.
00:12:21.020 Okay, hold on, hold on.
00:12:22.340 So what you're saying is actually an important thing to distinguish here, because what you're
00:12:25.720 saying is we do want today's civilization to collapse, but we want...
00:12:31.020 We don't want it to collapse.
00:12:32.240 It's inevitable.
00:12:32.720 We expect it to collapse.
00:12:34.980 It is inevitable.
00:12:36.160 But we would like the culture that springs out of the ashes of this collapsed civilization
00:12:43.960 to not experience a subsequent collapse, correct?
00:12:47.680 Yeah.
00:12:48.140 We've seen this cycle happen over and over again.
00:12:51.080 You want the cycle to stop.
00:12:53.020 So I think the other important thing to talk about here, though, is that most people would
00:12:59.340 still see that as their doomsday scenario, because I think people are very attached to
00:13:06.500 how things are.
00:13:07.540 Like West Roman Empire no longer existing equals bad situation.
00:13:14.800 We also see this in a discussion of, you know, we talk a lot about selecting embryos for
00:13:19.200 apologetic risk scores.
00:13:20.500 We talk about CRISPR babies.
00:13:21.860 We talk about with technology over time, we're selecting very aggressively for certain
00:13:25.620 in a way that it could shift certain populations, you know, very significantly along certain
00:13:31.420 measures that are valued by different groups.
00:13:33.880 And people respond to that often by saying like, oh, this would be a really bad thing.
00:13:39.460 It could, you know, some sort of speciation event.
00:13:44.220 It could trigger the end of the human race.
00:13:46.900 And our response to that is, well, you know, if it's better, if it's the next step, if it's
00:13:51.660 something superior, that's a good thing.
00:13:53.420 But I think most people see that as a bad thing.
00:13:55.560 So they wouldn't even see a very adaptive response to civilizational collapse worth it,
00:14:03.440 because all they care about is, is my current civilization going to disappear?
00:14:07.420 If so, okay, well, then I'm going to mope about it.
00:14:09.500 Well, most civilizations, most iterations of humans, you know, they view anything that's
00:14:15.380 not their current system as not civilization.
00:14:18.900 They'll say, if it's not my current people, if it's not this current civilizational structure,
00:14:23.140 it's not civilization.
00:14:24.780 And it's the same way with how they see people.
00:14:26.580 If they're different in any way from me, then they're not really people.
00:14:30.580 That is, I mean, that's literally the position that a lot of our detractors take, where they're
00:14:34.740 like, well, if you're doing any sort of gene selection or something like that, it could
00:14:39.080 lead to something that's different from us, and therefore not deserving of human rights
00:14:44.240 or like a fundamental threat.
00:14:45.540 And I, you know, that's really, that's just the way people have always been.
00:14:49.940 They're always afraid of the different.
00:14:51.860 What's fortunate is those people usually get quashed in history.
00:14:55.300 Like, they're not really relevant.
00:14:56.640 People who are afraid of change just aren't relevant in this great cycle.
00:15:00.460 They may have the foresight to see a collapse coming, but their solutions are pointless
00:15:08.040 to the extent that they're not really worth us concerning ourselves with.
00:15:11.300 And we can see this playing out in the world today.
00:15:13.660 So you look at one of the countries, like if we're talking about fertility collapse as a
00:15:18.420 sign of like things just aren't working, you know, one of the places where you see this
00:15:23.380 the most is in South Korea, right?
00:15:25.960 In South Korea, it's defined by conservatism.
00:15:30.440 In fact, that is what is instigating the fertility collapse in South Korea, is the world is changing.
00:15:39.340 Women are going into the workplace.
00:15:42.160 And then these women who have gone into the workplace and who now have to get educated
00:15:45.380 so that their economy can like barely compete with the world economy, where everyone else
00:15:49.040 has doubled the number of workers through putting women into the workplace.
00:15:52.760 Well, they're still expected to serve a traditional woman's role in the family.
00:15:56.780 They're still expected to do basically all of the housework, all of the cleaning, all of
00:16:01.020 the child care.
00:16:02.060 And because of that, they're not having kids.
00:16:05.920 And then in addition to that, you have this really strict model of what a family is, you
00:16:09.440 know, with the two-parent households.
00:16:10.640 And in Korea, it is really, really difficult up until recently to have a kid if you're not
00:16:16.400 in a two-parent household.
00:16:18.000 So what does this mean?
00:16:19.400 This is a huge group of people that just aren't having kids.
00:16:22.540 And yes, like statistically right now in the U.S., it is true throughout the world.
00:16:26.780 You are better off if you're from a two-parent household.
00:16:29.220 Absolutely as a kid.
00:16:30.800 Is that to say that through social experimentation, we can't come to social technologies that create
00:16:35.340 alternatives to that, that are equally efficacious or more efficacious?
00:16:40.040 Maybe.
00:16:41.260 It's difficult to say.
00:16:42.340 So one of the statistics here that suggests this for me is that if you look at single
00:16:47.340 male parents versus single female parents, single male parents just do astronomically better,
00:16:52.860 like the kids end up just doing way, way, way, way better, almost to the extent that they're
00:16:57.500 not really doing that much worse than two-parent families.
00:17:00.320 And so the question is, why is this happening?
00:17:02.240 My guess is that what you're really seeing there is single male parents, it's usually
00:17:08.640 the woman died, or it's much more likely that the woman died or disappeared due to some
00:17:13.920 exogenous factor, whereas single female factors, it's much more likely a divorce because women
00:17:19.580 win custody much more often.
00:17:21.260 This is just due to custody rates.
00:17:22.820 I'm not saying it's like any other rate.
00:17:24.640 It's if the other spouse is still alive, well, the woman's probably going to win custody,
00:17:29.700 except in like an extreme, extreme case scenario.
00:17:32.160 So what you're filtering out is people who have failed relationships, right?
00:17:35.620 And of course, those people are going to be worse at being parents.
00:17:38.640 So what this says to me is it's more the type of people who opt into single parenthood who
00:17:43.940 are statistically doing worse.
00:17:45.720 It's not that single parenthood intrinsically does worse at raising kids if you were able
00:17:51.240 to experiment with it.
00:17:52.080 Now, of course, we're not experimenting with it, so whatever.
00:17:54.800 But then other things in South Korea, you know, there's a lot of, you know, any sort
00:17:59.680 of nonstandard social structure, like gay families and stuff like that.
00:18:02.560 They're not having kids in South Korea because there's this, again, conservatism against that.
00:18:06.400 So I think with conservatism, what you see is we have dropped many traditions that are
00:18:11.580 very important to maintaining social cohesion.
00:18:15.320 And, you know, we do identify and are largely conservative.
00:18:19.380 However, I think that within the conservative movement, there are two factions.
00:18:22.780 There's the traditionalist faction, which is to say, let's just go back to the way things
00:18:26.460 used to be.
00:18:27.360 And then there's the other faction that says, you know, this progressive super virus has
00:18:30.940 screwed everything up.
00:18:32.680 Yet we need to we need to learn from tradition.
00:18:35.500 We need to harvest truths from tradition, which can help us through this situation while also
00:18:42.900 understanding that people who blindly cling to traditionalism are likely going to be as
00:18:47.220 swept away by that sands of time as the extremist progressive mind virus zombies.
00:18:53.060 So what I'm getting is basically you can't turn back time, remove technology, not really.
00:19:03.900 I mean, if you you can try, but there will always be some groups that continue to use it
00:19:07.780 and they will outcompete you, right?
00:19:09.620 So there there is no option to go back to full pure traditionalism, really, with some exceptions,
00:19:17.280 I suppose, like you could go Amish and find a niche that kind of works for you.
00:19:21.280 So that's symbiotic with society as it progresses.
00:19:25.400 But that's a limited, limited choice.
00:19:28.940 I can explain what I mean by this.
00:19:30.340 It might make more sense.
00:19:31.300 Right.
00:19:31.660 So a specific example today.
00:19:34.100 So you have a lot of Catholic integralists within the Conservative Party and Catholic intellectuals
00:19:39.080 within the Conservative Party.
00:19:40.060 And a lot of them would say, well, we need to go back to, you know, no, no contraception,
00:19:45.200 no abortions, which, by the way, we're fairly against abortions.
00:19:49.740 But anyway, so no contraception, no abortions.
00:19:51.900 They want to go back to the way things used to be.
00:19:55.340 And that's how we can get fertility rates up.
00:19:57.320 And yet we have seen countries that have imposed these.
00:20:00.600 You know, you can look at Malta, for example, some of the strictest anti-abortion laws in
00:20:04.820 the EU, and yet their fertility rates, like 1.2, when Romania banned, it was Romania, right,
00:20:10.120 that banned abortions?
00:20:11.680 Order 6, whatever.
00:20:13.320 Yeah, anyway.
00:20:14.160 Yeah.
00:20:14.580 So fertility rates went up for a very short period, but then they came crashing back down
00:20:19.120 again to the same fertility rates as everywhere else in the region.
00:20:22.260 It's just not effective.
00:20:23.620 And this is where it becomes scary, because humans, one of the social changes that we're
00:20:29.300 dealing with, is humans are becoming increasingly infertile.
00:20:33.020 And you can't outrun infertility with just having sex more often.
00:20:41.040 Not anymore.
00:20:42.020 Not at the levels to which you're looking at a 50% reduction in sperm count over the past
00:20:46.380 50 years.
00:20:46.900 Over that, you know, a 30% reduction in testosterone rates in, what, the last 20 years or something,
00:20:51.340 literally the feminization, the biological feminization of men in our society from endocrine
00:20:57.800 disruptors, which we can see in experiments, like the links of, I don't know the word here
00:21:02.860 that's not going to get this video in trouble.
00:21:04.660 But the point being is that even in like seven and eight-year-olds, you know, you see more
00:21:08.120 feminine play in males who were gestated and mothers who had a lot of these endocrine
00:21:13.220 disruptors, literal feminization.
00:21:15.260 So you can't just rely on these old systems to keep your fertility rates high.
00:21:20.120 Eventually, if the trends can trend you, which everything seems to indicate that they are
00:21:25.300 continuing, humans will become increasingly and increasingly infertile.
00:21:29.100 And the more you hold to IVF bad, you know, because with IVF you're losing access to some
00:21:35.000 embryos, the more you as a cultural unit are going to struggle against the cultural units that
00:21:42.920 are aggressively using IVF, one, to not only combat this fertility collapse, but also to
00:21:50.180 expand their own fertility windows.
00:21:52.180 So you can look at a family like ours, right?
00:21:54.260 And we're likely, I mean, we were, how many kids we need to have?
00:21:57.060 Seven, 12?
00:21:59.320 And I mean,
00:22:00.400 As many as possible.
00:22:01.820 Until they take out your uterus, right?
00:22:03.620 Because everyone is done with the C-section again, through technology.
00:22:06.800 And so the, the, the, but that's something that we wouldn't be able to do.
00:22:10.500 I mean, we'd be ending the natural end of our fertility life cycle in the near future
00:22:14.880 if we were relying completely on biological reproduction.
00:22:18.060 But because we're able to use, you know, scientific assisted reproduction, we are able to expand
00:22:23.240 that window dramatically and expand the number of human lives that will get to be lived because
00:22:28.900 we, you know, pushed with that technology.
00:22:32.240 I, I, the, the, the analogy we always use with sort of the God thing is people are like,
00:22:36.420 well, isn't this, isn't this playing God?
00:22:38.840 And, and we say, well, you know, if, if God has a coop hit my kid, you know, I'm going
00:22:43.860 to do everything in my power to, and I think God wants me to do everything in my power to
00:22:48.560 try to pull the coop off my kid and get my kid to a hospital.
00:22:51.300 If God has a semi-truck hit my kid, God probably wanted that kid dead.
00:22:55.680 When God gives us the scientific technology to tackle these sorts of problems,
00:23:01.600 my assumption is he's not stupid.
00:23:04.280 He knows we have access to this technology and he gave us access to this technology for
00:23:08.660 a reason.
00:23:09.220 He allowed it to be invented for a reason.
00:23:12.120 And that reason is the expectation that like trying to lift the coop off my kid and resuscitate
00:23:17.140 them and bring them to a hospital is he expects us to engage with it.
00:23:20.480 I mean, I respect cultures that take another angle to this, but I do worry for them because
00:23:25.860 I, I, I do not see how they continue to survive in a changing biological and social environment.
00:23:34.920 When would you say traditionalism does work?
00:23:37.940 Like I am thinking about Mennonites in general, they managed to hold a fairly traditionalist
00:23:44.960 view.
00:23:45.340 I don't think it was necessarily in reaction to predictions of civilizational collapse, but
00:23:51.900 still, when do you think, how do you think it's done well?
00:23:55.740 Traditionalism strictly outcompetes the urban monoculture.
00:24:00.300 It always does historically.
00:24:02.020 And today the traditionalist groups, you know, you go back to Roman times, these groups that
00:24:07.220 were going back to the pagan ways and to these, these mystery cults, they were psychologically,
00:24:12.540 at least this is my read from the text, fertility rates, everything outcompeting these sort of
00:24:18.280 urban hedonist groups, right?
00:24:21.160 But they were themselves being outcompeted by the Christians.
00:24:25.260 So the answer is traditionalism is strictly better and you can see it.
00:24:31.280 You just see it whenever you're looking at the data.
00:24:33.540 There's a reason why conservatives since Pew started collecting data have been happier than
00:24:38.840 progressives, right?
00:24:39.820 The, the progressive monoculture, the, the sort of mind virus that, that dominates our
00:24:46.400 urban centers in the world right now is astronomically worse than traditional approaches.
00:24:52.800 And we admire people who had the competency and the clarity to see this and, and return
00:24:59.000 to traditionalism, but we do worry that that strategy typically doesn't work out in the long
00:25:04.540 run.
00:25:06.200 And I feel like you answered my question.
00:25:07.900 What's the question?
00:25:09.800 Where does it work?
00:25:10.680 What's the, if you want to take a traditionalist approach to, you don't care about being represented
00:25:18.840 in this new version, this new cycle, what's the best way to tackle traditionalism?
00:25:26.920 Well, I mean, full on.
00:25:28.020 I mean, the Amish groups have the highest fertility rates.
00:25:30.620 They probably have the highest rates of, you know, mental health.
00:25:32.960 So to fully isolate gap and disinterpreting, like either hold your own city state, isolate
00:25:41.460 yourself within communities.
00:25:42.560 Do not, do not engage in business with outsiders.
00:25:45.340 Do not use their technology.
00:25:47.320 Do not use their social networks.
00:25:48.960 Do not socialize with them in general.
00:25:50.540 Just full on ear gapping is the best way to go.
00:25:54.020 That's the core trap of traditionalism is that it is more effective.
00:25:58.460 The more extreme you go with it and effectiveness increases linearly with how extreme you take
00:26:04.960 it.
00:26:05.720 So you are always, so like, if you talk with like a Catholic traditionalist, right?
00:26:09.240 Like they're actually not that much of a traditionalist.
00:26:11.340 If they were more of a traditionalist, if they moved more like on the Amish side of the
00:26:14.760 spectrum, if they disengaged with technology completely, if they went off the grid, they
00:26:18.580 would see a rise in mental health.
00:26:20.180 If they would see a rise in fertility rates, they would see a rise in all of the things that
00:26:24.400 show vitality within their culture.
00:26:25.740 Okay, so what I, what I'm getting though, which I think is actually interesting is that
00:26:30.280 if you go full on traditionalist in the way that you can only really show dedication to
00:26:35.240 traditionalism, like truly be traditionalist to leave modern civilization, you're almost
00:26:41.360 doing the same thing that those who innovate even further and lean into new social technology
00:26:47.340 are doing, and that you are becoming something that isn't the current civilization, meaning
00:26:52.320 that maybe their guess is as good as yours as to what works.
00:26:56.480 Like, let's say that humans are moving in a technologically terminal direction.
00:27:01.780 It could be, let's use AGI as an example, right?
00:27:05.220 There's a scenario in which the technophilic people who totally get on board with AGI are
00:27:11.000 completely screwed over by it.
00:27:12.580 And the people who go full on Luddite and totally go offline and hide in little, you
00:27:17.100 know, enclaves hidden perhaps from AGI or like somehow managed to lean in it and avoid
00:27:23.160 it, like in some sort of battle star galactica.
00:27:25.320 There's no escape evil AGI.
00:27:26.020 Everyone dies in an evil AGI scenario.
00:27:28.440 Okay, well, let's then maybe use a non-AGI thing.
00:27:30.820 But like, let's say that there's some kind of just unhealthy social or technological innovation.
00:27:35.660 A completely era apt traditionalist group could be as roughly innovative and capable creating
00:27:43.840 the next cycle as one that leans into the change.
00:27:47.640 No.
00:27:47.760 You don't think so?
00:27:48.620 Why?
00:27:49.640 Because technology, social innovations, they are force multipliers to your efforts.
00:27:56.820 Would you say that's always the case?
00:27:58.540 I would say that innovations in dating markets have been very well adaptive for humans.
00:28:03.680 Innovations in like food processing.
00:28:06.380 Progressive innovations in dating markets.
00:28:08.300 Again, you need to look at other groups.
00:28:10.820 See, this is the problem when people think about accelerationist cultures versus non-accelerationist
00:28:15.040 cultures is they look at them from the progressive of progressive cultures versus what they think
00:28:20.080 of as conservative cultures.
00:28:21.620 And that is not the thing.
00:28:22.860 There are accelerationist conservative cultures and traditionalist conservative cultures.
00:28:27.100 So an example of an accelerationist conservative culture is the Mormons.
00:28:30.200 Things like dating wards, that's a very new invention.
00:28:35.460 That is a new social technology.
00:28:37.600 The Mormon community is actually incredibly accelerationist in terms of their adaptions of
00:28:42.940 completely new social technologies.
00:28:45.520 So yeah, I mean, this idea that, and their solutions, I think are better than any type of
00:28:53.860 dating solution that's ever existed in history.
00:28:56.060 I think dating wards, for example, are a better solution-
00:29:00.380 You mean singles wards?
00:29:01.580 Single, singles wards.
00:29:02.700 LDS church singles wards.
00:29:04.100 Are a better solution to dating than literally any theoretical solution that anyone has ever
00:29:12.100 tried before at the cultural level.
00:29:14.940 And yet people would hear about singles wards and they'd be like, oh, that must be a cultural
00:29:18.140 thing that Mormons have been doing forever.
00:29:19.940 But they're not.
00:29:20.820 And this is where things get really interesting to me.
00:29:24.020 Sorry, what was the point you were making?
00:29:26.100 The wider point I was making was that there are many social technologies that may just
00:29:30.520 be terminal, but people who lean into them may just not live because they get inherently
00:29:36.720 unhealthy because there's no adaptation for the processed foods and just a certain portion
00:29:45.300 of the population is going to end up obese and quite unhealthy when exposed to that environment.
00:29:49.600 Right.
00:29:49.780 So if your argument is certain things that this urban culture is spitting out are just
00:29:54.780 not working, like dating markets, there are many solutions to that.
00:29:59.240 One is more traditional dating markets, but there's a hundred other solutions to that.
00:30:03.240 And any of those solutions are going to be labeled as conservative extremist solutions.
00:30:07.360 That's just true because they deviate from the urban monoculture and therefore they are
00:30:13.380 conservative extremists.
00:30:14.520 And this is how we find ourselves on the same team often as the traditionalists.
00:30:18.440 Because from the perspective of the urban monoculture, if you try something different, if you fight
00:30:24.020 against them, if you try to develop new dating practices or anything like that, then you're
00:30:27.480 just an extremist.
00:30:29.140 And I think to the point that you were, one of the points you were making earlier, you
00:30:33.360 said, well, why can't traditionalist group end up being the group that survives?
00:30:37.660 And the answer is, is because the effectiveness of traditionalism is linearly correlated with
00:30:45.600 how traditionalist you become, with groups like the Amish being the most effective forms
00:30:50.400 of traditionalism.
00:30:51.380 The problem is, is that technology bequeaths you with many advantages, whether they are health
00:31:00.680 advantages or just the advantage of one group having automatic weapons and the other group
00:31:05.880 not having automatic weapons.
00:31:07.660 Being able to produce, or one group having automated drones and the other group trying
00:31:13.000 to fight those drones with automated weapons.
00:31:15.480 You cannot fight a group that technologically leans in if you're a group that technologically
00:31:20.660 leans out.
00:31:21.620 You can maybe like passively fight them for a bit, but at the end of the day, you always
00:31:27.280 lose.
00:31:28.120 And this is true with genetic technology as well.
00:31:30.520 You know, if one group is doing selection for stuff like IQ, within just a few generations,
00:31:35.120 there'll be multiple standard deviations higher than the other group.
00:31:39.220 And you know, you could argue, well, IQ isn't really measured.
00:31:42.380 Whatever.
00:31:42.820 You really think that a group that is like three standard deviations below another group
00:31:48.380 in IQ is going to be able to compete with them if they try to wipe them out or something?
00:31:52.300 It's just not going to happen.
00:31:54.340 And that's the truth of it is that it's the groups that embrace social change while also
00:32:01.660 realizing that the mechanisms of social change that are being grabbed onto by this sort of
00:32:08.860 urban monoculture, this mind virus, are just simply not functioning.
00:32:12.880 And so I think that we need to recognize that the traditionalists are our allies to an extent
00:32:18.460 for now, and they may be our allies in the long term, so long as they can adapt to mindsets
00:32:24.340 that aren't just like progressivism in disguise and waiting to wipe us out the moment they
00:32:29.060 gain power.
00:32:30.040 But the great thing is, is that if we continue to technologically progress while they're not
00:32:35.280 technologically progressing, it doesn't matter.
00:32:38.360 Hmm.
00:32:40.320 Yeah, that makes sense.
00:32:41.480 So, I mean, in the end, traditionalism isn't, it doesn't run contrary to what you're saying
00:32:47.440 to accelerationism.
00:32:48.560 I mean, a traditionalist who, I think what many traditionalists really are going for is
00:32:53.600 they would rather see a future that supports values and they see a crumbling of their values,
00:32:59.120 not so much that they're afraid of new technologies.
00:33:00.980 And I think what really changed my mind from this conversation was your highlighting the Church
00:33:06.560 of Latter-day Saints singles wards as new innovation.
00:33:10.920 And that being a form of accelerationism, because it shows that you can have traditional values
00:33:18.580 and adopt new technology to support them, which I think is, in the end, what traditionalists
00:33:24.780 want to support them.
00:33:26.240 Well, I mean, no, they don't want that.
00:33:29.400 They don't want that.
00:33:30.000 You mean they just want to go?
00:33:31.340 I mean, I think there's a fraction of traditionalists that kind of just like traditions that support
00:33:36.660 their values and they'd be willing to change them in the face of new conditions.
00:33:40.400 So it's kind of weird to me that that wouldn't be the case, to just keep doing something.
00:33:45.460 Well, then they're not traditionalists.
00:33:47.280 I mean, they are accelerationists.
00:33:49.100 That's what we are like.
00:33:50.240 So you look at like, for example, the types of, one of the things we're building out right
00:33:54.640 now for our family and like a collection of family groups that we're a part of is, quote
00:33:58.360 unquote, a new London season, right?
00:34:00.300 Where people get together who are looking to marry in a single location for one weekend
00:34:06.580 a year.
00:34:07.120 And there are a number of parties hosted that have specific rules that make it easy to find
00:34:11.600 a partner and specific types of like social shaming and stuff like that that make it easy
00:34:15.000 to find a partner.
00:34:15.920 All of this is a very conservative thing to do.
00:34:19.040 It's a very accelerationist thing to do.
00:34:21.380 It is heavily inspired by something that happened traditionally, the London season.
00:34:27.340 That's where it gets its name.
00:34:28.760 However, to say that it's a recreation of the London season, it's just comical.
00:34:33.460 It's cosplay at best, but it's better than cosplay because what it is, is it's an innovation.
00:34:40.260 It's saying, okay, this is one way an older group used to solve this problem.
00:34:45.420 Can we, through internet, through flights, through other technologies that enable new approaches
00:34:51.080 and social technologies that we build, create an iteration of that that is more efficient
00:34:57.800 than any that have existed before?
00:35:00.500 And those people are accelerationists.
00:35:02.960 All accelerationists base their ideas on tradition because you're certainly not going to get good
00:35:08.460 ideas from these progressive groups.
00:35:10.800 You know, and you know me, when I'm looking for like holidays we do for our family, when
00:35:14.620 I'm looking for social institutions, when I'm looking for the way that we build our school
00:35:19.740 system, you know, I am looking into the history of the Catholic church.
00:35:22.980 I am looking into the history of the Mormon church.
00:35:26.440 I am looking into old traditionalist movements because that's where the interesting social
00:35:32.620 technologies that can be tweaked and innovated upon come from.
00:35:36.820 Being an accelerationist means you have an intense reverence for both studying the traditions
00:35:42.760 and engaging with the traditions while also believing they can be improved upon.
00:35:47.580 The thing that differentiates the traditionalists from the accelerationists is the traditionalists
00:35:51.940 do not believe they can be improved upon.
00:35:54.500 Do you think that's true?
00:35:55.240 I mean, do you think that most people see accelerationism that way?
00:35:57.960 Because I feel like accelerationism is anti-traditionalist.
00:36:02.360 Just throw it all out.
00:36:03.560 I've not heard of this hybrid that you're describing.
00:36:07.480 I mean, progressivism isn't accelerationism.
00:36:10.340 Progressivism is like a weird deviant virus.
00:36:14.140 It is not related ideologically to accelerationism.
00:36:19.880 It's just not accelerationism.
00:36:22.000 I'd say if you're looking for one of the pure forms of accelerationism, that's Mormonism.
00:36:26.760 Mormonism is sort of a pure...
00:36:29.260 Calvinist ideology is often considered a very accelerationist ideology.
00:36:33.540 Ideologies that are accelerationist are often very strict and they do not look like...
00:36:38.380 Another example of an accelerationist ideology would likely be the Haradi, the Jewish community.
00:36:45.120 So they do a lot of things that to somebody who's not really that familiar with history
00:36:48.960 look historic because they deviate from cultural norms
00:36:54.020 and they deviate from cultural norms in a way that apes some historic things.
00:36:58.400 But really, most of their practices are quite new.
00:37:01.180 And most of their most successful practices are quite new.
00:37:04.080 And so, yeah, that's my point.
00:37:05.760 Yeah, okay, you're giving me a more nuanced picture of what...
00:37:10.620 I mean, I previously viewed traditionalism and accelerationism very differently.
00:37:15.000 So I appreciate your clarifying your views on these things.
00:37:20.380 Well, thanks for that.
00:37:22.360 I have a lot to think about now.
00:37:23.860 And I'm looking forward to our next conversation.
00:37:26.460 Wonderful.
00:37:28.860 I love you.
00:37:31.860 I love you too.