Based Camp - June 07, 2024


From Disgust to Cringe to Vitalism: Examining the Evolution of Cultural Frameworks


Episode Stats

Length

39 minutes

Words per Minute

178.59412

Word Count

7,030

Sentence Count

404

Misogynist Sentences

6

Hate Speech Sentences

31


Summary

In this episode, we discuss a concept that has been on our minds for a while now. It's a concept I have been thinking about personally, and a fan sent me some ideas that helped me flesh out this concept into a broader concept about how our society functions and where we are moving as a society through the pervading nihilism of our current age.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I think it was the recognition that disgust-based morality was leading to
00:00:04.260 immoral actions, like the persecution. No, hear me out here.
00:00:08.080 I genuinely think it was the disgust-based morality caused the persecution of
00:00:12.640 LGBT individuals that led to the destruction of that system.
00:00:16.780 That's not just how ridiculous it ultimately was.
00:00:21.140 Yeah, because many people were like,
00:00:22.460 why am I attacking somebody for something about themselves that they can't
00:00:26.960 change? I think it's the new cultural framework that is going to dominate in the next age,
00:00:33.520 which is the age of vitalism.
00:00:36.940 So vitalism, I would define as a cultural framework that sells itself with a love of
00:00:45.200 existence and a love of being who you are unapologetically.
00:00:50.340 One of the problems with the vital system,
00:00:51.980 and I'll also explain why it's going to potentially eventually crash,
00:00:56.040 is often the people who care the least about how society judges them, like us, for example,
00:01:03.060 because of that, they lack a general moral framework and they'll just do narcissistic
00:01:09.900 stuff all the time in a way that like the Tiger King or Trump does, right?
00:01:14.540 Would you like to know more?
00:01:15.960 Hello, Simone. We are going to be discussing a very interesting topic today, and there's going
00:01:21.560 to be a long emble at the end of this because sometimes we just have casual conversations
00:01:25.900 before them, and we had a really interesting one before this episode. But I'm going to be
00:01:29.680 discussing a concept that I have been thinking about personally, and a fan sent me some ideas.
00:01:36.440 It actually helped me flesh out this concept into a broader concept about how our society
00:01:42.540 functions and where we are moving as a society and a realistic path through the pervading nihilism
00:01:50.960 of our current age. This story starts in the age of our childhood or our parents when the dominant
00:01:59.940 cultural group in the country was Protestant Christianity. These were the days of the satanic
00:02:07.240 panic and a lot of the anti-gay stuff and stuff like that.
00:02:12.200 We're talking the 80s, early 90s.
00:02:14.300 Yeah. There was, and I love that some people still think we're there. Like, they still think
00:02:18.160 like the Republicans are like the anti-gay party or something like that. It's freaking insane.
00:02:22.860 Like, I cannot, it's insane. 45% of gay men voted for Trump, by the way. Like, we are no longer
00:02:29.120 in that the gay party and the non-gay party. Society has done a 180 since then. But anyway,
00:02:34.400 back to what we were saying here. Or at least that was one study. Some people, it's only
00:02:39.440 one study. Yeah, because it doesn't agree with what you want to believe. You're just
00:02:43.300 throw it out. Anyway, we need to take it back here. In that world, while there was a philosophical
00:02:50.800 structure for what the conservative ideology was, like the Christian philosophical structure,
00:02:57.260 everything like that, it wasn't that philosophical structure that motivated individual action,
00:03:04.140 voting, and decision-making among the Republican party when they were communicating with the mob,
00:03:10.340 I guess you could call it. Specifically, the way that they communicated was through disgust.
00:03:17.260 And by that, what I mean is they're like, doesn't it disgust you when you see gay people kissing,
00:03:23.360 for example? Therefore, we should ban that, right? Doesn't it disgust you when you see X or Y?
00:03:31.120 That is how they motivated the export of their cultural value system. And in reaction to that,
00:03:39.200 interestingly, the far left began to deify things that disgusted them. That was how they fought this.
00:03:48.060 And you actually see this in leftist art. One thing I always mention is Vanderhoeven,
00:03:51.720 who's being interviewed about Star Trek Troopers. Really, you should watch our Star Trek Troopers video
00:03:55.780 if you haven't seen it. I think it's one of the best that we've done. But in the interview,
00:03:58.800 he was like, I was surprised that people didn't realize it was supposed to be a parody against
00:04:03.620 ultra-right-wingism because everyone I casted in it was beautiful. And I thought that people
00:04:08.880 would recognize that meant that it was supposed to be evil, like they were supposed to be evil
00:04:12.480 like bad guys. And I just love this world perspective of if a thing is beautiful, it is
00:04:17.180 therefore evil. And you actually see this in a lot of post-modernism and stuff like this.
00:04:21.520 And it actually helps me understand a little bit of the hatred of us. We've gotten online hate for
00:04:28.660 naming our kids after Romans, like Octavian, for example. They're like, this is a sign...
00:04:33.720 Or Scandinavians. We get hate for that too.
00:04:36.280 Yeah. The Roman one is more interesting to me because we actually do have Scandinavian
00:04:39.780 heritage. That is your family's original last name before Ellis Island. The Roman one is
00:04:44.620 interesting because I don't have Roman heritage. Romans were not white. Romans subjugated and
00:04:48.920 enslaved white people. They were a Mediterranean population group. I guess if you want to call
00:04:53.460 them white, you can. Historically in the United States, they were not treated as white. Italian
00:04:58.660 immigrants were not treated as white immigrants. They were treated very badly.
00:05:02.240 The Irish weren't treated as white immigrants either in many ways.
00:05:05.160 And this is why probably the Hispanic immigrant group today that is seen as a separate ethnic group
00:05:10.420 is not going to be seen as a separate ethnic group. They're no less white than Italians.
00:05:14.760 But anyway, Italians had a problem with organized crime and everything too. So remember that.
00:05:18.920 Where was I going with this? Oh yeah. But why do I elevate this cultural group that stomped
00:05:23.460 mine, right? That civilized us, right? They took us when we were savages in the woods,
00:05:30.880 worshiping stones and stuff like that. And they brought us a different system. And I think
00:05:36.640 that system made us better. And then we went out and we exported that system all over the world.
00:05:44.060 This was the period of imperialism. And a lot of people are like, oh, that was such a horrible
00:05:48.160 thing. And I think that they capture something true about us when they're like, why do you
00:05:52.540 look up to the Romans? We don't look up to the Romans because we are the Romans. We look up to
00:05:57.020 the Romans because they showed strengths, competence, and beauty in the things that they created,
00:06:01.640 especially in contrast with our ancestors of the similar period. And when they are looking to people
00:06:06.780 to uplift from that same period, if you look at like the far progressive mind, you're looking at
00:06:11.440 somebody like Bambi Thug, where she is uplifting like wicked in this neo-paganism, where they are
00:06:18.160 looking for the weak group of that period, where the older conservative systems uplifted beauty and
00:06:24.800 demonized things that disgusted them. They also uplifted strength. The problem that those systems
00:06:28.700 have is that they communicated this to the mob through disgust systems, which can allow for people
00:06:34.480 to be victimized. And it's very easy to mistake disgust, an innate reaction that we evolved to try to help
00:06:40.400 us have more surviving offspring, either through not engaging in reproductive behavior that will
00:06:45.580 lead to lower offspring. I think that's why we have disgust towards things like male relationships.
00:06:50.020 I want to support gay people. And I think a lot of gay people don't recognize this. I could not be
00:06:55.920 more pro-gay. I lived throughout my entire high school career with a gay roommate, not living with
00:07:02.960 my family or anything like that, a GSA. And then in college, my academic dad with a gay guy. It's your core
00:07:08.500 social community. And these were communities I was choosing. But even with that, my brain still
00:07:15.520 instinctually exports a disgust when I see men kissing. That is something that I can't help but
00:07:24.340 feel. And that's just the way human sexuality works. It includes arousal and it includes disgust.
00:07:30.280 And you don't get to choose what arouses you or what disgusts you.
00:07:33.360 Yeah, it's just important that I don't confuse that with a moral intuition. And this is something
00:07:38.520 that Christianity also was figuring out in the 80s and 90s. I think that is what Mother Teresa
00:07:44.300 represented for a lot of people, is that when you see somebody with leprosy, your average person sees
00:07:49.940 them and their brain exports disgust because it's trying to get them to not interact with somebody
00:07:54.360 who might be diseased. But a lot of people in these older moral frameworks confused that disgust
00:08:00.700 With a lack of morality. With evil. With evil. Like they must be immoral if they are causing
00:08:06.940 disgust. Yeah, or they have sinned in some way or this is a sign of their sinful life or
00:08:11.580 depending on your religious framework, sinful past life, etc. Right?
00:08:16.000 It's very important that our society moved past disgust as a metric for morality and immorality.
00:08:26.680 But during that period, the seeds of the worst impulses of modern progressivism were sowed,
00:08:32.740 which is a cultural group that in the figures in history that they worship and look to with reverence
00:08:38.740 and was in modern times they worship and look to as reverence, is weakness and ugliness are seen as
00:08:45.660 signs of greatness, which can seem like a very bizarre philosophy, but it makes sense if you look at
00:08:51.060 where it grew, which was originally in opposition to a moral framework that was using disgust to shape things.
00:08:57.120 Fair.
00:08:58.680 But then we move from this disgust framework to another framework that is, I think, equally bad.
00:09:05.760 And it's the framework that we're just now leaving now.
00:09:08.420 And I would say this spans from late 90s through 2020 pretty much, right?
00:09:15.480 Yeah, I think we're only just now seeing it.
00:09:20.000 Emerging from it.
00:09:21.240 Just now emerging from it.
00:09:22.940 And this is the era of cringe motivating mass action.
00:09:27.940 Mm-hmm.
00:09:28.980 Which is very different from disgust, though.
00:09:31.580 Which is very different from disgust.
00:09:33.360 Yeah.
00:09:33.720 Cringe is secondhand embarrassment.
00:09:36.320 And it is embarrassment about somebody breaking social norms that they may not have recognized
00:09:44.300 were social norms or something like that.
00:09:46.500 Right.
00:09:46.740 This motivated during the dominance of the urban monoculture in our society, when we switched
00:09:52.960 from the Christian group having control to the urban monoculture having control, this
00:09:57.280 largely progressive group, they motivated mass action through cringe.
00:10:02.480 Cringe in others and fear of cringe yourself.
00:10:06.480 Yeah.
00:10:06.740 Which is why when you look at polling, for example, there are fewer people now than at
00:10:11.420 least ever before in this polling that are willing to not only express their views on
00:10:15.400 controversial subjects, but express their views on any subject at all.
00:10:19.460 The extent to which people are afraid of criticism is off the charts now.
00:10:24.580 And I think that's a product of the era of cringe, right?
00:10:27.960 Yeah.
00:10:28.160 And I think that that was the result of cringe, which now people are recognizing as bad.
00:10:32.020 When you use cultural conformity as your primary method of communicating with the mob, eventually
00:10:40.260 intellectually alive players are going to be like, yes, but the end state of this is everyone
00:10:45.720 thinks the same.
00:10:46.700 Everyone acts the same.
00:10:48.320 Everyone's afraid of being creative or interesting.
00:10:51.900 And I think that almost you can see as a perfect counter and reflection to this BAP, Bronze Age
00:10:59.460 Pervert, who I mentioned in another recent video, where I think he is, his entire thing is like
00:11:04.980 a performative artistic statement against the dominance of cringe culture.
00:11:09.380 And I think so out there, so flamboyantly unapologetic in stances that are quite colorful.
00:11:18.320 And that break every one of the cringe culture's frameworks.
00:11:23.060 So you can contrast him with somebody like, who I actually used to respect as an intellectual.
00:11:29.720 I don't like the path that he's gone down.
00:11:31.680 Mylon Yiannopoulos.
00:11:32.740 Oh, okay.
00:11:34.600 Who would have, yeah, like these, but these were, no, more like he would have, give speeches
00:11:38.380 and then get canceled and then have people come on stage and freak out.
00:11:41.360 Yeah.
00:11:41.560 Mylon Yiannopoulos.
00:11:42.780 Yeah.
00:11:43.180 But Mylon Yiannopoulos was actually still operating under cringe culture.
00:11:49.360 Like he liked it being a shock junk, but he never actually really broke the rules of progressive
00:11:55.020 society.
00:11:56.260 He was still operating under the cringe framework.
00:11:59.000 He was just trying to show that it wasn't logical or logically consistent.
00:12:02.740 Like that was his whole thing.
00:12:04.800 Bap, who I think is equally as colorful as Milo.
00:12:08.000 So I don't think it's just that he's colorful that makes him this through the cringe to base
00:12:12.540 because base, as we've said on our episode, you know, you need to pass through the tunnel
00:12:16.060 of cringe to get to base.
00:12:17.440 Yeah.
00:12:18.000 And I really, truly believe this.
00:12:19.640 I think that all base is intrinsically cringe because to be base, you have to go against the
00:12:25.660 dominant cultural framework, which is what's cringe is the secondhand embarrassment.
00:12:29.360 And to be based what it really is to, and I actually, this is really interesting.
00:12:35.400 And I think how we got to this sort of based culture, which is the perfect anecdote to cringe
00:12:40.660 culture, which is people can't feel secondhand embarrassment for us.
00:12:45.380 Not easily because we take ownership.
00:12:48.420 We know we are breaking cultural norms.
00:12:50.580 We know where the cultural norms are we are breaking, and we are doing it intentionally
00:12:55.520 and take pride in those decisions because we believe that those cultural norms are bad
00:12:59.460 cultural norms.
00:13:01.160 Where cringe exists, right?
00:13:04.400 Like where you can get cringe in breaking cultural norms is you break cultural norms just because
00:13:08.960 you're not aware of them.
00:13:10.180 Or you break cultural norms because you're part of a separate cultural group and you just don't
00:13:15.140 see them as normative.
00:13:15.980 So you're just doing your own thing.
00:13:17.200 And for those individuals, they can be like, oh, they didn't know, poor child.
00:13:20.800 I actually think Trolls does a great job of showing the racism.
00:13:26.780 The kids movie Trolls.
00:13:29.000 Well, Trolls World Tour.
00:13:31.080 And showing the racism intrinsic, and I'll put the clip here, in this cringe world perspective
00:13:38.080 where she meets the country trolls, great, the rural poor for the first time.
00:13:42.620 And she's shocked that their songs are sad.
00:13:45.800 And she goes, don't they know that music is about making you happy?
00:13:48.920 And then she's like, oh, they must not know.
00:13:51.520 And so she's going to go tell them to erase their culture in favor of her culture because
00:13:55.960 her culture is obviously correct in the way it relates to the arts.
00:14:00.520 And their culture is obviously wrong in the way it relates to the arts because it's different,
00:14:04.880 right?
00:14:05.120 And I think that movie also, I'll have the other clip here, they do such a great job in
00:14:27.060 that movie, of showing the sin of progressivism, the sin of progressivism actually being about
00:14:36.180 cultural imperialism, where she's, we can make us all the same.
00:14:39.940 Like she's, we can understand that we're not really different.
00:14:42.040 And then one day we can all come together.
00:14:44.020 And Trolls are like anything but that.
00:14:48.380 It's our differences.
00:14:50.020 And this is what I think in this new conservative movement, the recognition that progressives
00:14:53.100 claim to love diversity, but don't actually think anyone's different.
00:14:57.560 Men and women aren't different in their perspectives or proficiencies, different cultural groups,
00:15:00.860 different ethnic groups.
00:15:01.680 Why would diversity matter if no one's different?
00:15:03.600 But if you elevate the difference, if you're like, it's actually good that we're different
00:15:06.680 and that English people with different proficiency than perspectives, we can achieve better outcomes.
00:15:12.160 But to do that, you need to recognize that we are actually different and that different
00:15:16.060 cultural groups are actually better at different things on average.
00:15:21.040 Not everyone in a cultural group, but on average, they have slightly different proficiencies
00:15:24.780 and perspectives.
00:15:25.900 If we combine our music, she'll see that music unites all Trolls and that we're all the same
00:15:30.300 and that she's one of us.
00:15:31.820 I mean, no disrespect, but anything but that.
00:15:35.060 History is just going to keep repeating itself until we make everyone realize that we're all
00:15:38.760 the same.
00:15:39.940 But we're not all the same.
00:15:41.980 Denying our differences is denying the truth of who we are.
00:15:46.160 Just out of curiosity, what do you think brokered our shift culturally from disgust to cringe?
00:15:54.720 Was it the fact that content creation became pervasive online and a bunch of people who
00:15:59.940 weren't subject to public scrutiny before suddenly were?
00:16:04.000 What changed?
00:16:05.640 So no, I think that it's people like us in BAP, really.
00:16:08.840 So it was the key...
00:16:10.240 No, no, I'm referring from disgust to cringe.
00:16:12.620 This is...
00:16:13.100 Disgust to cringe.
00:16:13.720 Yes.
00:16:14.640 I think it was the recognition that disgust-based morality was leading to immoral actions.
00:16:22.240 Like the persecution...
00:16:23.720 No, hear me out here.
00:16:25.380 I genuinely think it was the disgust-based morality caused the persecution of LGBT individuals
00:16:31.240 that led to the destruction of that system.
00:16:34.020 Okay, that's not just how ridiculous it ultimately was.
00:16:37.300 Yeah, because many people were like, why am I attacking somebody for something about themselves
00:16:43.700 that they can't change?
00:16:45.100 So essentially, there was enough of a recognition of the lack of truth and impracticality of disgust-based
00:16:53.000 reactions.
00:16:54.000 And in general, support for progressive causes that caused an elevation of, honestly, of disgusting
00:17:02.480 things that people found disgusting.
00:17:03.760 There's the whole, like, Mary Harrington conspiracy theory that I love of the reason why children's
00:17:10.140 book illustrations now are so ugly, more tracks with the rise of progressive culture than
00:17:15.120 anything else.
00:17:15.920 And it's almost like a psyop that's encouraging people to normalize ugliness as part of this
00:17:21.340 embrace, to your point, of disgust.
00:17:24.640 Yeah.
00:17:24.940 Any normal person, she would invoke a strong, immediate instinct of disgust.
00:17:30.220 But progressives have learned to treat that emotion as a sign that something is more morally
00:17:35.020 pure and more worthy of engagement.
00:17:37.900 And there was a period at which it was useful to counter that feeling of disgust, but this
00:17:41.680 disgust should just be ignored, not elevated.
00:17:45.900 And I think now people realize, well, that's stupid.
00:17:48.340 And the key that broke the lock of this second system was the based individuals who previously,
00:17:54.560 when they were dunking on cringe, just people like Chris Chan and stuff like that.
00:17:57.640 People who just had no clue what they were doing and were breaking cultural boundaries
00:18:02.220 because they were usually, like, mentally ill people or, like, actual racists or et cetera.
00:18:08.800 Then, or, like, just behind the times.
00:18:11.220 But you can't argue that BAP or us are behind the times.
00:18:14.200 Like, we break it.
00:18:15.720 The key that breaks that lock is people being like, wait, these people are subverting the
00:18:21.500 culture but have pride in who they are.
00:18:23.900 Right?
00:18:24.160 And I actually think this is what led to Trump winning the election.
00:18:28.260 And I'll explain what it is because I think it's the new cultural framework that is going
00:18:33.120 to dominate in the next age.
00:18:35.060 And I think it's a sustainable one, which is the age of vitalism.
00:18:40.340 So vitalism, I would define as a cultural framework that sells itself with a love of existence
00:18:49.120 and a love of being who you are unapologetically.
00:18:53.280 And I think that this is where we see individuals like Tiger King exploding onto the stage.
00:18:59.720 Tiger King did so well because he ignored, you know, in the past, that is what would have been
00:19:05.800 called cringe.
00:19:06.760 But in our time, he knew the cultural norms he was violating.
00:19:10.460 He just had perfect ownership over who he was and was proud of who he was.
00:19:14.520 And even though he was a genuinely reprehensible person, that is no longer the way people relate
00:19:21.360 to others.
00:19:21.940 I think Trump, for example, while I think he was a good president, I think he's a morally
00:19:26.780 reprehensible human being.
00:19:28.540 I think he is a bad human being.
00:19:30.980 When I look at the way he's treated his wives, when I look at the way he's, it's just gross
00:19:35.500 to me.
00:19:35.920 But in the age of vitalism, what we're going to see, and I think that this will scare a lot
00:19:40.080 of people, is a lot of reprehensible human beings are going to be elevated through vitalism
00:19:46.380 because one of the problems with the vitalist system, I'll also explain why it's going to
00:19:50.980 potentially eventually crash, is often the people who care the least about how society
00:19:57.060 judges them, like us, for example, because of that, they lack a general moral framework
00:20:03.140 and they'll just do narcissistic stuff all the time in a way that like the Tiger King
00:20:10.540 or Trump does, right?
00:20:11.660 And so we need to then transition from a purely vitalistic system to a vitalistic city on a
00:20:19.580 hill system, which I think is our end goal.
00:20:22.480 That's fun.
00:20:23.560 The idea of we are trying to create something beautiful in the future, like this consistent
00:20:32.960 striving, not that we are the city on the hill right now, but the city of the hill that
00:20:38.280 will exist in this vision of a more perfect humanity that we can strive towards.
00:20:44.840 Aristotelian.
00:20:47.180 Aristotelian.
00:20:47.740 The word I was looking for was imanestize the eshton, which means in political theory
00:20:56.620 and theology, to imanestize the eshton is generally a pejorative phrase referring to attempts to
00:21:02.540 bring about utopian conditions in the world and to effectively create a heaven on earth.
00:21:07.680 Theologically, the belief is akin to post-millennialism as reflected in the social gospel of the 1880s
00:21:14.940 and 1930s era, as well as Protestant reform movements during the second great awakening
00:21:19.300 in the 1830s and 1840s, such as abolitionists.
00:21:23.820 I'll add it in here.
00:21:24.880 Yeah, but.
00:21:25.500 And I think it's bad to think that you're like living in that now or that there's ever this
00:21:29.620 perfect society that you can create because that leads to things like communism and stuff
00:21:32.800 like that.
00:21:33.680 But I do think a moral system around an ever improving society is the way to go.
00:21:38.960 And when people look at like the way that we're framing our public images, it is with this
00:21:43.660 based vitalism in mind.
00:21:46.020 Our end goal is present.
00:21:47.280 But will I get there?
00:21:48.160 I don't know.
00:21:48.680 But that's where I'd like to end.
00:21:50.400 Okay, sorry.
00:21:50.900 I shouldn't say that's our end goal.
00:21:51.900 That's like our mid goal.
00:21:52.960 End goal is I should say we live in such an early time in human history.
00:21:56.280 We haven't even lived through a period where one human ruled a planet yet.
00:21:59.580 But question Simone, what are your thoughts?
00:22:02.520 I think the transition tracks.
00:22:04.240 I can intuitively feel a shift from disgust to cringe.
00:22:11.240 And then I also can feel that shift from cringe to based slash vitalism, which I'm seeing
00:22:17.480 even now.
00:22:18.260 For example, I keep hearing people talk about hate following or hate subscribing to people
00:22:24.120 who originally they might argue were cringe.
00:22:28.140 And then after spending more time hate watching their content, and this happens with us to
00:22:34.400 a certain extent, because we do get emails from people about this, they at least either
00:22:40.800 they actually come to see their views as being legitimate and join their side, or at the very
00:22:47.640 least, they start to envy the fact that they have this very vitalistic life that they hold
00:22:55.660 to their morals, they're very happy in pursuit of them.
00:22:58.500 And they envy that confidence and lack of cognitive dissonance that these people who are just
00:23:05.360 so confident in their lifestyles, however wrong these hate watchers find them to be, are.
00:23:11.900 For example, I hear one person I follow online hate watches a bunch of Mormon influencers who
00:23:19.380 live out in Miami, or not Miami, sorry, in Hawaii.
00:23:22.080 And this person hates everything about their values and their lifestyle and never wants
00:23:26.860 to have kids themselves, etc.
00:23:28.180 But then can't stop watching these wholesome Mormon families.
00:23:32.340 And then we're going to see more and more of that.
00:23:33.920 And this is where the transition starts to happen is that the more you start to question
00:23:37.880 your own lifestyle and see that other people, no matter how much you disagree with them,
00:23:42.700 are experiencing a level of vitalism and success and happiness that in your entire pursuit
00:23:49.340 of happiness, you could never achieve, it's going to get you thinking differently.
00:23:53.600 And I think that's interesting.
00:23:54.800 Yeah, I actually think that's a really core point.
00:23:57.280 And it's why wholesome baseness was the key to always defeating cringe culture, is that
00:24:03.540 cringe culture motivates individuals to watch these individuals outside their cultural framework,
00:24:08.700 because that's where they're getting the satisfaction.
00:24:10.360 At least I'm not like them, the secondhand embarrassment.
00:24:12.540 Yeah, look at how backwards and dumb these people are.
00:24:14.580 But then they look at, look how, you get this sort of, look how backwards and dumb these
00:24:18.860 people are.
00:24:19.640 It goes from, ha ha, look how backwards and dumb these people are.
00:24:23.260 And then they're watching like the wholesome Mormon family and they're like, look how backwards
00:24:28.760 and dumb these people, wait a second, wait a second, am I the backwards and dumb one?
00:24:34.900 Like my community doesn't have their shit together.
00:24:37.260 Do these people have their shit together?
00:24:39.060 What happens first is they just hate them and make fun of them.
00:24:41.800 Then they start to critique elements of their lifestyle.
00:24:45.440 Oh, the trad lifestyle, that's not really what trad is like.
00:24:49.920 These trad influencers are just showing a caricature.
00:24:52.820 But then they're more like, but the trad lifestyle in general, I kind of support.
00:24:58.120 Like they have to find new reasons as to why these people are cringe that aren't actually
00:25:02.880 related to their lifestyle.
00:25:05.540 And I think that's where the adoption starts to take place.
00:25:08.100 And it's one of our things is be so wholesome, it's cringe, you know, in the way that we
00:25:13.980 relate to each other and our kids and everything like that.
00:25:16.280 I think one thing that was said when you were talking about this, and I think that this is
00:25:19.680 a broad thing that people are going to realize because we live in a secular society now.
00:25:23.960 And a lot of people are brought up secularly.
00:25:25.960 They can only think of religion in this dehumanized context of like religious insane extremists
00:25:31.600 instead of people who still have a spark of light in their eyes.
00:25:34.360 And if you're like, what do I mean by the spark of light, talk to an Amish person or something
00:25:37.780 like that.
00:25:38.080 Somebody in one of these communities where they're really true believers and you will
00:25:41.260 see this light of human dynamism in their eyes that you just don't see from these ultra
00:25:47.500 woke individuals, which just look, I almost say like soulless when you're interacting with
00:25:51.300 them.
00:25:51.620 And a lot of their content feels that way.
00:25:53.520 It just feels like it lacks any passion anymore.
00:25:56.680 And it's that religion and faith are a choice.
00:26:00.540 And that was the core thing that sort of we realize when we're putting together this faith
00:26:03.880 system for our family is we made a choice to believe these things.
00:26:10.240 Yeah, let's try it.
00:26:12.880 Like, like, and, and, and I think that that's a really interesting thing about faith as a
00:26:18.380 concept that people without faith don't understand, right?
00:26:24.500 They think that faith is blindly believing things that don't have full evidence to support
00:26:31.120 their frameworks, right?
00:26:33.020 When what faith actually is making the choice to believe those things.
00:26:40.300 And when you reach a moment as like a hate watcher of the wholesome Mormon group or something
00:26:47.180 like that, where you're like, wait, I can just choose to be like them.
00:26:51.720 The problem for a lot of people with something like Mormonism is they're like, then I have
00:26:54.600 to make too many sacrifices around things that I want for logical consistency purpose and
00:26:59.940 everything like that.
00:27:00.820 And that's the core purpose of our tracks videos.
00:27:03.380 If you haven't seen those, it's like our own religion that our family has that we're trying
00:27:06.820 to put together that we'll get back to, it's one of my favorite projects, but it requires
00:27:10.080 a lot of intensity in terms of mental effort to write one because I need to think about
00:27:15.440 how it could be misinterpreted.
00:27:17.200 If this ends up working and becomes a religion 500 years from now, how could this be misinterpreted
00:27:22.040 to cause hatred or bigotry or, or mass negative action and stuff like that.
00:27:26.960 But I'm also trying to create it as a genuine descendant of the Christian and Jewish and Muslim
00:27:32.000 traditions, mostly the Christian tradition, mostly my Calvinist ancestry.
00:27:35.440 And so I think of it as a form of Christianity, but it requires less, I think, you don't get
00:27:41.700 the benefit of antiquity with it.
00:27:43.460 So a lot of people are like, okay, antiquity, but a lot of these older religious traditions
00:27:46.740 don't really have that much antiquity in the way they're currently practiced anyway.
00:27:49.920 Even Judaism, right?
00:27:51.700 The Kabbalah was only added about a thousand years ago.
00:27:54.560 Only about a thousand.
00:27:56.300 Goodness gracious.
00:27:57.280 I mean, if you look at Christian frameworks, like a lot of the Protestant beliefs, rapture are
00:28:01.120 fairly new.
00:28:01.960 Yeah.
00:28:02.180 But debatably, but most scholars think that it's a fairly new belief.
00:28:06.200 So these religions evolve all the time and we simply see ours as the, but then we choose
00:28:11.780 to believe things that don't make sense to people.
00:28:13.420 We're like, yeah, God is real, which is interesting that we call ourselves atheists, but we believe
00:28:17.920 in God.
00:28:18.300 Like our Wikipedia says we're atheists, but I'm like, but I also believe in God.
00:28:20.800 And people will be like, how do you square that?
00:28:22.300 And I'm like, because I don't see God as supernatural.
00:28:24.120 I think God like is an actual being that physically exists just at a different point
00:28:30.400 in time in a way that we may not understand in a way that we may see as supernatural from
00:28:35.220 our own perspective, but not in some other mystical realm, physically real thing, but
00:28:41.840 in a way that we may not be able to touch or something like that, but physically within
00:28:45.520 our physical constraints, the physical constraints that our reality operates with it.
00:28:50.380 But anyway, yeah, I think there was another thing I wanted to say here.
00:28:54.480 So one is belief of the choice.
00:28:56.000 We just try to make that choice come with as few sacrifices as possible for a broad secularist
00:28:59.280 while still motivating the core thing that religion motivates, which is austerity.
00:29:04.260 I think that just, you don't need to make all of the individual sacrifices so long as you're
00:29:08.340 making sacrifices across your entire life for the greater good and genuinely living with
00:29:12.620 those sacrifices.
00:29:13.260 People were so shocked.
00:29:14.100 They're like, oh, they stack their kids in a barracks, like behind me right here.
00:29:17.920 Um, in, in the dad's office and they, they don't put their heat on in the winter and
00:29:22.920 it's like, yeah, living with austerity used to be seen as an intrinsically good thing.
00:29:25.880 It's part of human vitalism.
00:29:27.480 But the final point I want to make here is in response to a question that somebody was
00:29:31.980 asking me that I found really interesting and got me thinking where they're like, why
00:29:36.500 do you think humanity is a good thing?
00:29:39.800 Like, why are you promoting this ideology where like humanity and the human potential future
00:29:46.760 is a good thing?
00:29:47.440 And I said, gosh, yeah, journalists just asked me that yesterday.
00:29:49.560 And I'm like, duh.
00:29:52.200 First of all, it's an irrelevant question because groups that don't think that humanity
00:29:56.340 is a good thing are going to turn nihilistic and cease to exist.
00:29:58.860 Yeah.
00:29:59.080 So it's not like mimetically an interesting question to me.
00:30:03.220 Obviously you need to somehow convince people of this, but two, because it's a choice.
00:30:08.860 I have faith in humanity.
00:30:10.940 I have faith that we will continue to improve.
00:30:14.960 And I think if we look through history, we do continue to, on the broad scale, improve
00:30:20.000 ethically, I think eventually biologically, technologically, in the way we relate to our
00:30:26.000 reality.
00:30:26.720 But this is also why I love pro-natalism because I see the next generation is better than the
00:30:30.640 last generation.
00:30:31.540 Totally.
00:30:31.880 Always.
00:30:32.380 And that's why I'm okay with death.
00:30:33.860 That's why we have this weird pro-death stance.
00:30:35.820 I don't want people to live forever.
00:30:37.200 I think that people after a certain age do not change their mind as much as young people
00:30:41.800 and cannot recontextualize reality as easily.
00:30:44.820 And this leads to negative externalities.
00:30:47.500 But realistically, my kids will be able to call up an AI of me whenever they want because
00:30:51.080 I've created so much content.
00:30:52.060 We already have some of our fans creating AIs of us that they can interact with, which
00:30:55.960 I've actually found really cool to use.
00:30:58.880 We can't share them yet, but you can put yourself on a list of them for dating advice and stuff
00:31:02.560 like that.
00:31:02.980 They're trained on specific side segments of our content.
00:31:05.700 And I just can't tell the people who are doing this how much I appreciate that they're
00:31:09.100 doing it because it's one of the goals of the creation of all of this for us is to have
00:31:12.820 a...
00:31:13.320 But then presumably my kids will be so much better than me in a few generations that
00:31:16.420 they would just see no reason to ask me questions except as a historical curiosity
00:31:21.080 of what someone of this previous period would have thought, not as like a fountain of wisdom,
00:31:25.560 which I think is the way that we would see if you could summon an ancestor's ghost
00:31:29.600 from 400 years ago.
00:31:31.380 Are you really going to learn anything about reality from them?
00:31:34.020 Not really.
00:31:34.600 It's an interesting historic curiosity, but I think that's what the life extensionists
00:31:38.580 are creating, but then they're going to consolidate power around them, which creates all sorts
00:31:42.080 of negative externalities because generally the longer you've been alive, the more you
00:31:44.880 can consolidate power.
00:31:46.240 And we've seen this with boomers, not letting the next generation rise up and creating an
00:31:49.160 intergenerationally worse society.
00:31:51.280 But I just think boomers are the worst.
00:31:53.120 Like the generation before them was awesome.
00:31:55.560 The generation before them was awesome.
00:31:56.560 They underwent so many hardships and they became better as a society.
00:32:00.160 They began to really challenge some of the systemic wicked problems of society and actually
00:32:05.020 begun to fix them like racism.
00:32:07.020 And then boomers are just like, eh, let's go back.
00:32:09.040 Let's become like fully racist.
00:32:10.200 But this time against like white people and Jews, like it's wild.
00:32:14.440 And it's been carried on the mindset that started with them in some of these younger generations,
00:32:18.020 but fortunately in the factions that are going to die out.
00:32:20.020 So I love humanity and I think that promoting that love and being excited to be a human and
00:32:26.800 excited to be alive and excited to create humans, I hope that this can be the thing that like
00:32:32.260 gets people interested in the future.
00:32:34.200 People being happy with who they are rather than this constant struggle to be happy with
00:32:39.180 who you are.
00:32:39.820 Whether or not you're happy with who you are is a choice and it is not one that you should
00:32:44.680 always make.
00:32:45.340 If you are a terrible person that needs to improve, you shouldn't work on trying to be happy
00:32:49.720 with who you are.
00:32:50.740 You should try to work to change yourself into somebody who deserves to be happy with
00:32:56.580 who they are.
00:32:57.500 I think that's why we're going to end up in a future with people who are like this,
00:33:04.080 those who are nihilistic, those who can't bring themselves to imagine why humans should
00:33:08.880 exist in the future, aren't going to have kids and their views won't be represented.
00:33:12.660 So I think it's going to be just fine.
00:33:14.680 I think what we're trying to fight for with pernatalism though, and what's interesting to me to
00:33:18.300 bring this back to the theme that you've highlighted is that what we're trying to fight against
00:33:24.320 is a return to the disgust system, because that's what a lot of the numbers look like
00:33:28.960 when you look at which groups are going to continue to reproduce and what's going to
00:33:34.420 happen when the woke monoculture essentially picks off anyone who's more open-minded or pluralistic
00:33:41.840 from those groups.
00:33:43.980 I want to be clear that a vitalist system is not a pro-beauty system necessarily.
00:33:49.380 No, it's a pluralistic, enthusiastic, high-energy system.
00:33:52.840 What you're talking about is-
00:33:53.680 So if I could describe the difference between these two systems.
00:33:56.120 In the past, there were some pro-beauty systems, right?
00:33:58.380 But pro-beauty systems are intrinsically, I think, over-exclusionary and overly culturally
00:34:02.860 conformist around what is beautiful, whereas the disgust, the vitalist systems, think of
00:34:09.940 them as the guy who rides into a room on a lion, dressed with an American flag, with
00:34:15.560 a torch in one hand and an AR-15 in the other hand, shooting into the sky, singing the national
00:34:21.280 anthem.
00:34:22.020 That's what I want to be, dressed in cyber armor.
00:34:24.720 I'll put on my Corgi picture on the page here.
00:34:26.940 Oh my god.
00:34:27.460 So that's what I want to represent, this book culture love of true Americana.
00:34:33.520 Yeah, it's not beautiful.
00:34:34.760 It's not ugly.
00:34:35.420 It's just extra.
00:34:36.840 I love you, Simone.
00:34:38.080 I love you too, Malcolm.
00:34:39.380 Well, no, it's proud of who it is.
00:34:41.160 That's what we need is pride in who we are.
00:34:43.360 And we've stamped that out outside of specifically approved subcategories.
00:34:46.820 Totally.
00:34:47.400 Yeah.
00:34:48.400 All right.
00:34:49.000 I'll see you in the Google Meet.
00:34:49.960 It's in the calendar invite.
00:34:51.560 Yeah?
00:34:52.300 Yeah.
00:34:53.020 Okay.
00:34:57.460 How are the kids this morning?
00:35:01.940 Great.
00:35:02.420 Sorry.
00:35:02.600 I was just checking to make sure I didn't have something, but I've got one at, yeah,
00:35:06.180 no, it's Wednesday.
00:35:07.360 11 a.m.
00:35:08.040 is when we have the...
00:35:09.540 Yeah, no, it's before that.
00:35:10.780 I was going to talk with the guy from Side Scrollers about working with him on the business
00:35:14.560 idea of the anti-go consultancy firm.
00:35:17.200 Because he used to run a large, like a gaming company type thing.
00:35:20.040 Yeah.
00:35:20.300 So he'd be a great...
00:35:21.620 I was actually thinking of reaching out to Jane Lindsay about doing something on this too,
00:35:25.620 he seems really sane and educated, and he could be a good person to rope into an anti-go consultancy firm.
00:35:32.520 The anti-bigotry consulting dream team.
00:35:35.280 Yeah.
00:35:35.740 And the goal would be to fight anti-meritocratic behavior, bigotry behavior that dehumanize
00:35:41.680 the specific groups.
00:35:42.420 It's wild when you think about it that there's progressive organizations.
00:35:46.560 The organizations have this one body within them, the DEI department, that is specifically
00:35:51.840 about exporting progressive cultural values.
00:35:55.080 It's a progressive department to make sure the company never doesn't act too non-progressively,
00:36:01.420 yet they don't have a parallel conservative department to make sure they never act too
00:36:06.680 out of line with conservative values.
00:36:07.720 Well, I think they see DEI as resolving a wicked problem in society at the level of the corporation,
00:36:17.800 because to the point of anti-racism as it is popularized in many spheres, you cannot just
00:36:23.420 not be racist.
00:36:24.360 You have to be actively anti-racist.
00:36:27.620 If you're not actively solving the problem, you're part of it.
00:36:30.720 Which somewhat, I would say, shores up with our philosophy in the sense that we agree that
00:36:36.720 if you see a mess, it is your responsibility to clean it up.
00:36:39.660 I don't care who spilled the milk, you need to wipe it up.
00:36:42.940 I think that's what they see.
00:36:43.900 But what's really interesting is, we'd actually talked about this in a video that I don't
00:36:46.500 know if it's going to go live, so I'll briefly mention the idea here because I think it's
00:36:49.180 a really interesting concept, and this will be put at the end of the video instead of
00:36:52.920 the beginning of the book.
00:36:53.720 The anti-racism, what it really is, remember how we divided ethical systems into consequentialist,
00:36:58.000 like the consequences of your actions are you judge the morality, it's logical, it is
00:37:02.680 the rule system that determines your actions, like lying is bad, therefore don't lie, and
00:37:07.240 then aesthetic, which is about masculine, in every decision you go, what is the most masculine
00:37:11.040 choice?
00:37:11.560 What is the most, you know, these people, what anti-racism really is, it's a logical framework
00:37:17.220 for interacting with reality, where with every decision you need to ask, what is the most
00:37:21.040 anti-racist choice I could make?
00:37:23.480 Yeah, or what is the most performatively inclusive, woke position I could possibly take, but it
00:37:30.120 is misused frequently.
00:37:32.700 No, but I think that that shows how you get bigotry as an end result of that.
00:37:37.480 When you do not include, because you're creating a hierarchy of groups within their view of what
00:37:42.640 racism is, where certain groups are more worthy of human dignity than other groups.
00:37:46.640 This is actually really interesting.
00:37:47.840 There was recently this scandal with a very progressive library that after a cis white
00:37:53.800 man leader retired for that library, they hired the perfect DEI, not only a very well-credentialed
00:38:00.360 and qualified woman to take the position, but a woman who was not white.
00:38:05.460 And where things went wrong for her, and where a huge sort of campaign against her was created,
00:38:10.720 I think probably started when she, I think, let go of some underperforming employees who
00:38:18.160 also didn't happen to be white, which I think shows where DEI has gone wrong, which is that
00:38:24.680 true DEI, which is what this woman was practicing is, yeah, when they were looking for someone who's
00:38:28.760 qualified, they chose to hire someone who also brought in a more diverse perspective.
00:38:33.800 But then when she actually focused on the outcome and mission of the organization over performative
00:38:44.220 preferential treatment for groups that have historically been discriminated against, then
00:38:50.460 she was defenestrated.
00:38:51.500 Yeah.
00:38:51.760 So it's just bigotry.
00:38:53.160 Yeah.
00:38:53.420 But hold on a second.
00:38:54.580 I got to get something.
00:38:55.360 I'll get started on the piece here.
00:38:58.700 And I think what's great about anti-DEI, I'm going to keep pitching this to people, is
00:39:03.200 that it actually increases profits.
00:39:05.160 If you had allowed her to do her real job, which should be anti-bigotry, you increase the
00:39:10.440 meritocracy within a corporation.
00:39:12.060 When you're doing DEI, you are intrinsically decreasing the efficiency of a corporation because
00:39:16.820 you are maintaining like underemploying employees and stuff like that.
00:39:20.540 Anyway, so.