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

Misogynist Sentences

15

Hate Speech Sentences

24


Summary

In this episode, we discuss the current state of the conservative movement and the role of technology in society, and the potential impact it could have on the future of civilizational collapse. We also discuss the role technology can have in society and the impact it can have on society.


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.