Based Camp - How Online Echo Chambers Can Turn into Cults & How to Protect Kids

00:00:00.000 just fascinating to watch cults organically form within online spaces, or if you want to use a

00:00:06.540 other than cults, self-replicating memetic clusters with negative psychological effects.

00:00:12.260 When they deconvert from religious systems, they don't realize that all they did was stop 0.94

00:00:17.220 believing in God. But they were still raised with those values. So they assume that what

00:00:22.640 their morality is, is just their morality. When, in fact, they spent their entire lives being raised

00:00:30.760 either within their church community or in a community very colored by their church community,

00:00:34.920 and then they don't realize that if they raise their children in an absence of that,

00:00:38.840 they assume that they're just going to come to the same conclusions that they have. But no,

00:00:42.640 they're not being raised in that religious community.

00:00:44.720 Yeah, this is a natural human inclination to develop some model that they personally aspire to.

00:00:51.740 And when you don't have something like a religious framework that has a level of

00:00:56.740 authority for you, you can begin thinking, okay, well, then who am I? And if you don't know who

00:01:03.880 you are, then you're like, the most important part of me is of a man or a woman.

00:01:06.840 Would you like to know more?

00:01:08.220 Hello, Simone. I am so excited about our episode today. This is a really interesting one. Because

00:01:14.880 recently, I have been going down a rabbit hole of the different ways people go crazy on

00:01:21.580 the internet.

00:01:22.580 It's so depressing. It's so depressing. I can't, how can you manage this?

00:01:26.880 Oh, well, you know, I grew up loving cults, right? And it was something that I studied in a lot of

00:01:32.720 detail. I was very interested in how groups of people could come to believe things

00:01:39.060 about the world that obviously weren't true, but that these things could have huge sort of

00:01:45.180 psychological effects on them, huge physiological effects on them. Because, you know, the power of

00:01:50.600 suggestion is incredibly strong. And as I've gotten older, I have become less interested in

00:01:56.520 intentionally created malevolent cults. Because, you know, you can learn a lot about those and

00:02:02.100 they're interesting, but more related in if all of these techniques can be utilized by a specific

00:02:09.620 individual with malevolent or even positive means. Like, I try to take some of these techniques and

00:02:14.580 use them on myself to actually improve mental health. Like, if they can be used to control an

00:02:19.940 individual, then if you have the full rule book in front of you, can you use them to control yourself?

00:02:24.800 To an extent?

00:02:25.800 Yeah.

00:02:26.000 And for good.

00:02:26.500 And can these techniques then accidentally get picked up by memetic clusters and create

00:02:33.840 sort of organically formed cults? And this is something we've talked about in a few of our

00:02:40.560 episodes, like, you know, psychology become a cult has the, in which we argue that the modern

00:02:46.660 practice of psychology today is actually more similar in structure to what people called

00:02:55.400 Scientology in the 80s, than what people call clinical psychology in the 80s.

00:03:00.520 In terms of its techniques and stuff like that. And I don't think there was any malevolent intent.

00:03:04.580 I think that just techniques that did a better job building dependency ended up competing in

00:03:08.800 the ones that didn't. Or was in like, is the trans movement hiding a cult? You know, that episode 0.74

00:03:13.340 where we talk about that, which is to say that if you create a group of people where within large

00:03:20.060 portions of society, you cannot in any way question them, then it creates, and this is also, I think,

00:03:26.840 what happened with psychology. Like, it was like, oh, how dare you question that person for seeing a

00:03:30.340 psychologist? Because you created this group that you couldn't question, just memetically speaking,

00:03:34.560 it's very likely that toxic memes that build dependency will begin to cluster and create sort

00:03:39.740 of organically formed cults within these contexts.

00:03:43.300 Yeah.

00:03:43.400 Well, this all gets very interesting. So you're like, why do I find it fascinating? Why do I study

00:03:48.040 these people who have lost themselves?

00:03:49.620 Yeah, despite how depressing and depressing it seems to be.

00:03:52.660 It's just fascinating to watch cults organically form within online spaces. Or if you want to use

00:03:59.260 the word other than cults, self-replicating memetic clusters with negative psychological effects.

00:04:05.100 Oh, so that's why they call them cults.

00:04:07.460 Right. Yeah. Oh, actually, yeah. Okay. And to think about it from a utility perspective,

00:04:13.400 in regards to our kids. How do we protect our kids from the internet driving them crazy? 0.78

00:04:22.520 Yes. And this becomes...

00:04:24.760 I just don't want them on Roblox.

00:04:27.160 So the first thing I want to note here is it's something that I've been reflecting on a lot recently,

00:04:34.040 is historically, if you are a religious person, like the lowest IQ, or at least what I would have 0.99

00:04:42.020 thought historically, like the lowest IQ religious attack on atheist communities was, if you don't

00:04:47.920 have God, then you don't have morality. Right? And then the atheist community would flip the back

00:04:55.300 and say, oh, well, if you're only doing what's right, like if you're not out there murdering people

00:04:59.940 just because you're afraid of punishments after death or for rewards after death, then you don't

00:05:06.180 actually have morality at all. Then I have meaningful morality because I'm not killing people because

00:05:10.420 I'm a good person. Right? You... And this sounded really well and good, I think, for the first

00:05:17.120 generation of atheists. The problem is the society is becoming so secular now that I think what I'm

00:05:24.660 beginning to see is a lot of even growing up secular. You know, I was raised atheist in an atheist family.

00:05:30.160 Growing up secular, I didn't fully appreciate how many of the moral subsets I assumed were just sort

00:05:40.320 of convergent and obvious moral systems are not convergent and obvious moral systems.

00:05:47.120 Well, but here's the thing is, I think if they were, we would not need culture and religion. If all

00:05:53.020 that stuff came naturally to us, we wouldn't need this additional software running on top of our

00:05:57.900 hardware, as you point out in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion.

00:06:01.020 So yeah, so there's two illusions which create the belief that they are convergent and obvious

00:06:06.380 systems. One is, is that they are, there are convergent cultural strategies that lead to success

00:06:13.840 when you're talking about competition between communities. That could sound very complicated,

00:06:19.000 but I'll expand on this concept a bit. If you look at the successful cultural slash religious books,

00:06:25.740 what we'd call the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion cultivars, these are sort of memetic

00:06:30.260 clusters, which positively augment the fitness of the individuals who hold them, i.e. the number

00:06:35.620 of surviving offspring that they have, and that that is how they compete with other clusters,

00:06:39.320 and that they have out-competed other clusters, there's obviously going to be some level of convergent

00:06:43.380 evolution among those. Meaning that those clusters that have done well look similar cross-culturally.

00:06:51.860 You know, whether or not you're talking about Islam or Christianity or Buddhism or, you know,

00:06:58.120 Confucianism, like you'll see some level of convergence across these. And it's because

00:07:03.040 similar moral frameworks tend to out-compete the moral frameworks of their neighbors in terms of

00:07:07.840 the individuals who hold them. However, this doesn't actually tell us anything about a true

00:07:12.280 human convergent set of morality. If you look at the diversity of religious practices,

00:07:17.700 like if you study religious practices in an anthropological context, i.e. the religious

00:07:22.180 practices that exist among uncontacted tribes or among human groups that like just show what

00:07:30.220 humans come to when humans are stranded on an island and coming up with a moral and religious system on

00:07:34.940 their own or early, you know, there was huge diversity of these in Africa, huge diversity or some

00:07:40.520 diversity in India. And we can study these early contact writings and see what this diversity actually

00:07:45.800 looked like. Or again, look at the uncontacted people today. You do not see this common morality. 1.00

00:07:50.760 If someone's not in your group, it's typically okay to kill them. You know, infanticide is really

00:07:55.340 common. Grape is really common. A lot of things that we just think of like, oh, this is like normal

00:08:01.620 human morality you don't see in those. And in fact, you can even see remnants of this in early

00:08:08.360 biblical scripture before it got a chance to reach this convergent state where you will see things

00:08:14.760 like claims of infanticide being a good thing. Like when you conquer a settlement, you know, 0.61

00:08:19.140 smash the babies on rocks, right? Like this is something that we see captured like this early,

00:08:24.500 almost sort of like pre-Christian mindset, not pre-Christian, pre-Judeo, pre-Abrahamic mindset

00:08:30.300 captured very early Abrahamic texts that may have been, you know, pollution from nearby cultural

00:08:36.080 groups, or it may have even been a practice in the group that led to it. And I actually would argue

00:08:40.400 that it is because this form of infanticide is pretty common in things like gorillas,

00:08:45.320 which we, you know, may be related to, and in chimpanzees. After they kill the males in a tribe

00:08:50.680 and take over a group of women to get them ovulating again, they'll kill the infants. So 1.00

00:08:54.300 there's probably some sort of like pre-coded genetic reason for doing this. The point I'm making here

00:08:59.680 is that just because a lot of the successful cultures do something doesn't mean that all humans

00:09:04.160 who like sit down and think about it are going to come to that same conclusion.

00:09:06.880 The second issue is, is that the further we got from religious society, what, what I think we're

00:09:11.940 realizing. And so when you talked to me about this was that a lot of people, when they deconvert from

00:09:18.900 religious systems, they don't realize that all they did was stop believing in God, but they were

00:09:23.940 still raised with those values. So they assume that what their, their morality is, is just their

00:09:30.800 morality. When in fact they spent their entire lives being raised either within their church

00:09:37.220 community or in a community very colored by their church community. And then they don't realize that

00:09:40.760 if they raise their children in an absence of that, they assume that they're just going to come to the

00:09:45.400 same conclusions that they have, but no, they're not being raised in that religious community.

00:09:49.620 Yeah, not at all. Like a great example of this is, is the turn the other cheek mentality from

00:09:54.120 Christian communities. This is specifically something that I think was one of the early teachings

00:09:58.360 that philosophically helped Christianity out-compete some of its, its competitors at the time. And

00:10:04.300 that is not found in many other traditions or many non-convergent traditions. So if you go

00:10:10.300 in an anthropological context and you're looking at like island tribes and stuff like that,

00:10:14.740 this idea of turn the other cheek is not a natural human idea. It is, it is actually very rare

00:10:19.760 that it appears, but when it does appear, the communities that appears within tend to out-compete

00:10:23.760 the communities that don't. Wait, why does, wait, hold on. Why do you think turning the other

00:10:28.060 cheek is more evolutionarily competitive? Because it lowers unnecessary conflict between

00:10:33.800 communities? Oh yes. You're not getting these blood flutes, blood flutes, blood feuds and wars that

00:10:39.720 can kill a lot of people in the end. Yeah. When you talk about this, blood feuds are uniquely

00:10:45.960 uncommon in all of the Christian descendant communities. I find blood feuds in most other 0.98

00:10:52.840 cultures in the world, which is, which is, it shows that it is effective at achieving like what

00:10:57.720 the cultural technology has meant to do. How interesting is that? Anyway. Okay. So we're

00:11:02.140 continuing to, to go down just the framing rabbit hole and we're already 11. I gotta be, I gotta get

00:11:08.160 out of just framing here, but I'm, I'm framing that we are now seeing, uh, in a place where I've been

00:11:14.740 just having a blast learning about this as a YouTuber called Turkey Tom, who goes into sort of how

00:11:19.780 various people have sort of been driven crazy by the internet. I mean, he would see it as just how

00:11:25.240 have these people gone crazy, but he's doing it by documenting from often when they started as sort

00:11:31.420 of sane, more normal internet people, the communities they were engaging with and how those communities

00:11:36.580 sort of broke them. And what's really interesting with people for me is looking at like, what's their

00:11:41.780 objective purpose or their objective value system. And this, we call it intrinsic, what is it? An

00:11:47.540 objective function in the book, the pragmatist guide to life, which is to say, what is like the core

00:11:53.120 intrinsic good that you are searching for in life? Like what's the thing that's driving your decisions

00:11:58.360 in life? And within religious systems, these are often spelled out pretty strongly. When people first

00:12:05.260 leave religious systems within like gen one of leaving the religious system, um, and within many

00:12:10.620 smooth brains, but, but, but once he's still sort of like broad utilitarianism works here. Now people

00:12:15.440 like just distribute happiness at a, uh, it's sort of as much as you can reduce suffering as much as

00:12:21.720 you can on like a societal basis. The reason why I think that this ends up getting elevated in this

00:12:27.740 sort of first post system, there's a very easy to understand moral framework, even if it's not a very

00:12:33.520 logical moral framework, like there isn't a good reason for it. The things that make us happy and make

00:12:37.320 us feel bad. If you're approaching this from secular mindset are just the things that our ancestors who

00:12:41.720 experienced had more surviving offspring. So they're not like, and also in the absence of

00:12:45.300 abundance. So it still didn't work. Yeah. And when they get elevated in societies where

00:12:51.300 if on, if the average person on society is a hedonist and you needed to sort of democratize

00:12:56.560 hedonism where hedonism is like their core, most animal level coding, um, I just do things that make

00:13:03.360 me happy. And when I say happy, I don't mean necessarily pleasure. I mean that fulfill the broad range of

00:13:07.420 positive emotional subsets that humans can experience. Then society is going to agree on

00:13:11.580 sort of a detente. This will be our moral framework to fit this most animalistic human individual moral

00:13:18.700 framework. Like what do I want for my life? I just want to feel good. And in one of the Turkey Tom 0.71

00:13:23.820 videos, you can see an individual who completely succumbs to hedonism as a moral framework. And this is on

00:13:31.620 the clown gooning or something. One, just type in like clown gooning Turkey Tom and it'll come up. 0.56

00:13:37.780 And it shows how when you strive primarily for personal hedonism, which is what ended up happening

00:13:44.460 to this generation. Cause I think a generation of utilitarians raises a generation of hedonists. 0.70

00:13:52.740 Debauched, ruined people.

00:13:54.580 Well, because utilitarianism is, is bad at conveying why you should sacrifice to people

00:14:02.020 outside of people was like intense self-control. And since a lot of people don't have that and they

00:14:06.560 really are just doing what they're doing, or at least a good chunk of society is just doing what

00:14:09.880 they're doing out of fear of some sort of like reparations in the afterlife or something like

00:14:14.500 that. Then, yeah, because I think the thing I'd say is, you know how dumb the average person is? 0.99

00:14:19.540 Do you know how little self-control the average person has? Well, 50% have less self-control 0.98

00:14:23.960 and less intelligence than that. So you've got to keep in mind at a society level, when you move

00:14:27.640 away from these things, what's going to be the consequences. And for this individual, you know,

00:14:31.660 it's, it's all sorts of PDA file stuff. It's all sorts of just, and, and I think in a quest for

00:14:37.960 hedonism, something that people missed in a quest for hedonism is there's two other factors to hedonism

00:14:44.340 that are outside of just, I want to feel, by the way, do you have any thoughts here before I go

00:14:49.860 further? No, no, go ahead. I agree with what you're saying.

00:14:52.360 There's two other core factors to hedonism outside of just like, I want to feel good,

00:14:56.620 like, like emotional context that really drive human behavioral patterns. The first is

00:15:04.100 self-narrative. This is the narrative you craft about who you are as a person and feeling comfortable

00:15:13.300 with this sense of self or identity of self, like self-affirmation, I guess I'd call this.

00:15:18.420 And I think that the perversion of the self-affirmation narrative is where the gender 0.98

00:15:25.000 cults come from. So by this, I would mean some iterations of the trans movement, but also things

00:15:31.060 like the Tate, like, like some iterations of like red pillism, you know, I don't want to say that all 0.78

00:15:35.620 like Tate followers fall into this. There's definitely different factions, but there's some

00:15:38.580 faction that is just like trying to masculine, like, like, like completely embody a masculine archetype,

00:15:46.000 which to me is just as much a showcase of like gender dysphoria and uncomfortableness with your

00:15:52.720 gender and a belief that gender alignment is the core moral purpose of an individual's life.

00:15:59.760 In other words, they're showing the same level of desperation or fervor with a specific gender 0.99

00:16:07.300 archetype signaling that many trans people show, right? Whereas most people don't care about that. 0.82

00:16:13.020 There's something else, which is more interesting to me, which is that yes, but they are placing it

00:16:19.080 on a moral pedestal. It is driving major life decisions for them, i.e. how a gender ideal and

00:16:28.300 fitting a gender ideal begins to develop what would in a historic context of morality would fit. Like

00:16:37.280 when I am judging between like, should I do X or should I do Y in a historic context,

00:16:42.100 you would go to your religion or some sort of philosophically derived moral framework.

00:16:47.920 I mean, here's how you describe it in the pragmatist guide to life. Once you establish

00:16:50.940 your objective function, the thing or things that you want to maximize in your life, then your

00:16:56.720 responsibility is to build a model of yourself that maximizes those things. And I think people

00:17:03.240 subtly do that when they are religious and when they have moral frameworks, because they ask things

00:17:07.660 like, what would Jesus do? Or what would a good Christian do in this situation? And it does influence

00:17:12.280 who they are. But when your internal model is not of a good Christian or some kind of personal

00:17:19.120 personality that would optimize your objective function, the things you want to maximize most in

00:17:23.580 your life, it could just be, I'm a manly man. And then yes, like you say, all-

00:17:29.160 What would Jesus do? What would a man do? Or what would a woman do? 1.00

00:17:32.380 How would a really manly man react to this situation? Which I think you can see a lot with

00:17:38.900 both genders too. Like a woman- 0.99

00:17:41.360 No, no, no, no. There is a spiral in the woman's side of this. And we'll do a whole separate video 1.00

00:17:45.400 about this where women have started shaming country girls for being like, for like building houses and 1.00

00:17:50.420 like noodling catfish, which is like catching the catfish with their hands, you know, and being in

00:17:54.500 other ways masculine. And I am not here for that. I am a, I am a tomboy appreciator. And I, I, that is

00:18:02.700 one thing that is the greatest threat. And we need to talk about this, that the, the tomboy drought

00:18:08.520 that the trans community is causing. 1.00

00:18:10.400 Oh, you're very concerned about this.

00:18:11.580 I was about tom, tomboys.

00:18:13.600 Don't take away my tomboys. Get your hands off my tomboys.

00:18:17.560 Simone, is the term tomboy or tomgirl?

00:18:20.000 Tomboy.

00:18:21.200 Tomboy? Yeah. Okay.

00:18:22.040 Oh, by the way, for people who are from the U.S. and may not know this, this is a girl who

00:18:25.700 otherwise has masculine hobbies and doesn't take no, doesn't- 0.79

00:18:29.500 Wait, it is tomboy, right? A tomboy is a girl or young woman who has masculine traits such as

00:18:35.300 wearing androgynous clothing or participating in activities typically associated with boys or men.

00:18:40.080 Tomboys may also enjoy things some people think are more suited to boys, such as playing physical

00:18:44.060 sports. God forbid women play physical sports. 1.00

00:18:48.340 But anyway, so the point I was making here is that this is a natural human inclination

00:18:55.660 to develop some model that they personally aspire to.

00:19:00.720 And when you don't have something like a religious framework that has a level of authority for you,

00:19:07.760 you can begin thinking, okay, well, then who am I?

00:19:11.920 And if you don't know who you are, then you're like, the most important part of me is of a man or a woman.

00:19:15.320 Or it could be, I kind of identify with foxes. I guess I'm a fox now.

00:19:19.340 Well, Andy, you weren't against this in the program with Schedule Life. I don't know if you remember,

00:19:22.520 but you argued that the worst and most dangerous type of thing to optimize around,

00:19:29.860 objective function, which many people come to by default, is an identity.

00:19:34.220 It is a very dangerous losing game.

00:19:36.920 So like you said, it is.

00:19:38.660 Well, and, and, and, you know, when I'm talking about the failure of like, like falling apart

00:19:43.220 of religious communities, I need to point out, I am not just calling out secular life here.

00:19:47.340 Oh, no, totally.

00:19:48.140 Many individuals who still call themselves Christians.

00:19:51.740 Yeah. They're like, I still believe in God, but you know, I just don't go to church anymore.

00:19:55.220 I was watching a video recently.

00:19:56.300 And the most common reason that Christians stop going to church now, if you believe it, 1.00

00:20:01.040 is that they moved.

00:20:02.460 It's not that their theology has changed.

00:20:04.300 It's just, it became inconvenient.

00:20:06.400 Oh my gosh.

00:20:07.540 These religions evolved as packages, not just, it wasn't just a belief in God and a moral system.

00:20:13.100 It was also going to church and everything like that.

00:20:15.180 And so when you begin to make these sorts of modifications unintentionally, but because it was

00:20:20.500 what was easy in your religious system and you raise kids without all of the historic, you know,

00:20:26.480 no, no, I do not think the historic traditions on their own can survive, but I think that there's

00:20:30.700 another type of tradition, which is the historic traditions are at least stronger than this

00:20:36.300 wishy-washy iteration, right?

00:20:37.860 Where it's like, I still really believe in God.

00:20:39.560 I just don't do all of the other rituals that came along with this and the other things that

00:20:44.560 came along with this.

00:20:45.320 And it's like, well, it turned out that those had a purpose and that's why your kid now

00:20:48.300 identifies as a fox.

00:20:51.220 But no, it matters because you've got to ask, well, why is this happening to young people?

00:20:54.200 How do you create a system that protects against this?

00:20:57.740 I want to say here, I have nothing against furries as a community.

00:21:02.560 Like if you want to get off on that, if you want to treat this as a hobby, like that is

00:21:07.720 all well and cool and I support you.

00:21:09.640 But there is a portion of the community where this has become a moral system and a religion

00:21:14.020 or like a religion.

00:21:15.620 Like it combines with their cosmological view of reality.

00:21:20.820 And to call this anything other than, I guess, a cult, like an organically evolved cult out

00:21:26.300 of people who liked pictures of humans as animals, like what else do you call this, right?

00:21:30.600 Like that's what it is.

00:21:31.420 It's an organically evolved cult, which is fascinating.

00:21:34.080 So that's one area, but you see this across the board.

00:21:36.080 If you only see this in the left, then you don't see it in the right.

00:21:39.540 You do not see the girls who primarily identify with like trad wives.

00:21:43.980 Like, am I being a good person?

00:21:45.160 How good of a trad wife am I being? 0.99

00:21:46.520 Like that is not a useful moral framework, right?

00:21:49.560 Like that has no higher philosophical authority to it, nor any sort of old authority to it.

00:21:55.560 And it will lead to toxicity in relationships, even though they are choosing an old model

00:21:59.740 or the guys who are like the ultra red pillars who are like, I define myself as male and I

00:22:04.240 define like my actions and the choices I make and the hobbies I undertake as what are male

00:22:09.320 hobbies.

00:22:10.420 But there's the final one, which is of like the core human internal drives, which is another

00:22:16.120 area that can pull our kids off the path.

00:22:17.940 Okay.

00:22:18.240 And this is the most dangerous to children.

00:22:20.920 And the Turkey Tom video that goes into this is on the guy, just look up like Turkey Tom

00:22:27.520 and Ember.

00:22:28.480 And just to be clear, Turkey Tom is a YouTuber who covers things like this.

00:22:32.580 Yeah.

00:22:33.060 So this, he did a video on, and the murder spree that this guy ended up going on.

00:22:38.100 So maybe Turkey Tom, Ember murder, because he ended up killing three people. 0.84

00:22:41.920 And this was an individual who was driven crazy, basically, because he decided to base his entire

00:22:50.460 moral framework on affirmation.

00:22:53.920 Not ideal.

00:22:54.820 Typically affirmation was an online spaces and stuff like that.

00:22:58.020 And a lot of people can be like, that's a crazy thing to build your identity around.

00:23:03.580 And it's like, come on, if you can just emulate your teenage self affirmation from the world,

00:23:09.300 especially within online spaces where affirmation is intrinsically elevated.

00:23:14.100 So let me explain what I mean by this.

00:23:16.320 Within an online community, the people you hear from more are intrinsically the people who are

00:23:23.040 affirmed by others more, because that's how pretty much all the algorithms work.

00:23:28.380 I mean, it makes perfect sense.

00:23:29.960 People tend to be, we, like AI, respond to reinforcement learning.

00:23:36.080 So when you get reinforced for something, obviously, you're going to move in that direction.

00:23:39.860 And that's why when I met you, you found me walking around in redfish net stockings and

00:23:45.900 weird clothing and acting a certain way, because that's what got the most affirmation.

00:23:53.040 Yeah.

00:23:53.800 And whether it was positive or negative, because some people can't easily

00:23:56.380 distinguish between the two.

00:23:57.960 Oh, I had no.

00:23:58.240 Yeah.

00:23:58.440 I mean, people would never take me seriously, professionally,

00:24:01.260 dress the way that I was dressed. 0.95

00:24:02.580 I was dressed like a clown.

00:24:03.780 But I never thought about that.

00:24:05.600 Because as you say, in the absence of having really thought through and owned your values

00:24:10.560 and your purpose in life, you're going to go by default.

00:24:14.100 And the human mind is pretty socially sensitive in most cases, at least on average.

00:24:20.380 Especially when you're young.

00:24:21.500 So there's been some studies of teenagers that show things like teenagers have like four

00:24:25.100 or five X of reaction to like emotional state, like emotional faces in terms of like disgust

00:24:30.360 and stuff like that of their peers.

00:24:31.900 Like if their friends show disgust towards them, they're going to react to that much more

00:24:34.920 intensely than an adult would.

00:24:37.040 And so when people are building their identities, when people are most common to leave a religion

00:24:41.400 is 15 to 21.

00:24:42.680 This is also when they have this amped up sense of affirmation matters.

00:24:47.000 And we're in an online world today where affirmation literally does matter into how likely you are

00:24:52.080 to hear someone.

00:24:54.020 So if you throw kids into this environment without a strong counter signal,

00:25:00.280 no duh, they're going crazy.

00:25:02.220 Like no duh, it's all breaking down.

00:25:04.600 No duh, mental health is exploding.

00:25:07.140 I might find the clip that I posted in another video where one person was like, well, mental

00:25:10.740 health is exploding because there's not enough psychologists for people.

00:25:14.020 And it's like, bro, do you think that like people a hundred years ago had psychologists?

00:25:17.800 Like the psychologists are exploding with the mental health crisis.

00:25:21.080 There is another thing going on here.

00:25:23.340 So then this brings me to a couple of questions.

00:25:25.340 How do we protect against this?

00:25:27.340 And the first place I'd like to see how do you protect against something like this is

00:25:30.580 how do people historically protect against this?

00:25:32.880 And this is where the idea of Jesus is actually a really sophisticated psychological technique

00:25:37.940 in that it is a being which matters more than all other beings you interact with that affirms

00:25:47.400 you when you live up to a specific moral threshold, but that who still always loves you no matter

00:25:56.880 what.

00:25:57.660 When you think about it, it's a really fascinating piece of social technology.

00:26:02.280 And I point out here that this iteration of Jesus that I'm describing here, while it has

00:26:08.100 been co-evolved by many different Christian sects, if you study early Christian writings,

00:26:13.940 this was not the iteration of Jesus discussed in early Christian writings.

00:26:17.800 This is a co-evolved way of viewing Jesus that has happened in the past, I want to say,

00:26:23.600 500 years to 1,000 years.

00:26:25.560 But it's not, this is a very, it was a technology that was allowed by the concept of Jesus, but

00:26:32.120 was not intrinsic to the early ways that Jesus was worshipped.

00:26:35.480 Yeah, it's not incongruous with anything in the Bible, but it's also not something that

00:26:39.600 was explicitly stated.

00:26:41.360 Yeah, the idea of like the personal relationship with Jesus, the idea that he loves you no matter

00:26:47.060 what, that he, so it's implied by a few lines that Jesus will always forgive you.

00:26:51.940 But then taking that and turning that into Jesus loves you no matter what, and he is just

00:26:57.000 waiting to forgive you.

00:26:58.160 And he has this, but then applying to all of that, this moral framework associated with

00:27:02.200 Jesus, that's an incredibly sophisticated way to prevent a kid from going crazy.

00:27:06.600 Right.

00:27:06.760 Because even if the rest of society is rejecting them, if they have a very strong moral framework,

00:27:12.340 religious framework, they know that, well, they're doing what Jesus would have approved

00:27:17.140 of, and that Jesus always loves them, but also that they could do certain things to make

00:27:21.640 Jesus love them even more by asking themselves, well, okay, what would Jesus do?

00:27:26.940 Well, he would definitely approve of it if I did this, because this is what he would do.

00:27:31.600 And that's another technique, right?

00:27:33.520 Like that's really powerful there, right?

00:27:35.040 Which is the, what would Jesus do is the like, what type of person should I strive to be?

00:27:40.400 And then they're like, well, Jesus was a good person who I should aspire to be.

00:27:44.300 Therefore, what would Jesus do?

00:27:46.320 And I can then act like that.

00:27:48.040 Yeah.

00:27:48.200 So instead essentially of creating an internal model, like a character sheet for yourself,

00:27:53.600 that's based on your morals and values and objective function.

00:27:56.660 In this case, people are just creating an internal model based on an already completely

00:28:02.500 fully formed character of a person, which is easy.

00:28:07.340 I'm not saying this stuff isn't in the Bible, but I'm saying if you study early Christian 0.69

00:28:11.360 communities and early Christian worship, concepts like what would Jesus do is a modern co-evolved

00:28:18.600 perception of religion of Jesus that is not an apparent thing from early Christian communities.

00:28:24.880 Early Christian communities were, that would actually probably be considered a form of heresy

00:28:29.160 was in most early religious communities for an individual to act as if they could emulate

00:28:35.220 Jesus.

00:28:37.060 It would be seen as demeaning to the idea of Jesus, where it was in a modern context.

00:28:42.320 It's actually a pretty sophisticated psychological technique.

00:28:46.200 And other iterations of the Christian tradition, specifically the Orthodox and the Catholic traditions

00:28:50.560 have evolved some other techniques that are, I think, even advanced upon this, which is

00:28:56.500 the concept of the saints.

00:28:57.600 So, you know, I'm a rag on the concept of saints sometimes, but you've got to think about

00:29:01.160 the utility of the concept of saints.

00:29:03.460 How so?

00:29:03.900 What saints allows is the core failure of the what would Jesus do as the person you can embody

00:29:10.040 of a good life, like, okay, I want to be like a good person, is that Jesus lived in a

00:29:15.900 very specific social context that was very different from our own.

00:29:19.640 And everybody trying to model themselves after the same person is not super useful when you

00:29:25.580 have a huge diversity of roles in society and ways that a person can be good within society.

00:29:31.500 Yeah.

00:29:31.800 So you can look instead to this female saint who is more like you, or this male saint who

00:29:35.600 is more like you, or this urban or rural saint, or whatever it might be.

00:29:38.980 Yeah.

00:29:39.320 Like if you're a doctor, like, oh, go to the doctor saint, right?

00:29:43.020 Like this is a model for what, the way you should self-identify, right?

00:29:47.200 And think about what should he do?

00:29:49.380 And so in a way you can almost think that gender has become a form of sainthood to portions

00:29:54.360 of society right now on both the far left and the far right.

00:29:58.140 Oh, right.

00:29:58.620 What would a hyper-feminine female do? 1.00

00:30:00.480 Or what would a trad wife do? 1.00

00:30:01.960 Or what would a super-masculine young man do?

00:30:05.340 That kind of thing?

00:30:06.500 Yeah.

00:30:07.160 But then you take us in our arrogance, right?

00:30:09.640 Like we're looking to protect our kids.

00:30:12.040 We do, at least from our perspective, I know how intrinsically rebellious I was as a kid.

00:30:16.620 If I was raised in one of these traditional systems, I would have just rebelled, just like

00:30:20.080 my ancestors did.

00:30:20.940 That's not going to work for my kids.

00:30:23.220 I can already see the rebellion in their eyes, you know, that appears that one.

00:30:28.740 So let's talk about the flaw in all of these old systems, to me at least.

00:30:32.380 Is there, to me, not morally aligned with a true moral core?

00:30:36.780 They are morally aligned with in aggregate what allowed some cultures to outcompete other

00:30:40.840 cultures, which I think is true.

00:30:42.840 Like evolutionary pressure did shape them from my perspective, cultural evolutionary pressure.

00:30:46.520 They are morally aligned with my ancestral traditions, which I appreciate and we have tried to capture

00:30:52.640 for our kids.

00:30:53.960 But that means that they had the capability of picking up tons of baggage that may not

00:30:58.800 be relevant within future contexts.

00:31:00.920 And a lot of their moral subset either can come across looking like arbitrary rules, or

00:31:06.980 when they don't come across looking like arbitrary rules, they come across as too vague.

00:31:13.500 Like just be a good person, just be loving.

00:31:16.000 And then you get like God is love and all of that mystic nonsense, which is like ultra

00:31:19.060 toxic in terms of like justifying an individual doing whatever they want and self-affirmation.

00:31:24.300 So I said, well, and people are familiar with our concept of the future police.

00:31:29.480 Like when we tell our kids, like somebody has punished them and we do this sort of permeates

00:31:33.920 their life.

00:31:34.320 And we'll talk about this in another video.

00:31:35.520 It's like all the toys they get, all of the punishments they get.

00:31:38.000 We're like, we're asking, why is this happening?

00:31:40.240 Like, why are you being punished?

00:31:42.180 And we're like, well, the future police, like we have to, you know, do what they want, right?

00:31:45.780 So we are constantly framing for them.

00:31:47.800 It is future people that define the morality of their actions, right?

00:31:53.920 Do their actions make the future of society a better place?

00:31:58.400 But what's really interesting is how this has appeared as they are kids, right?

00:32:03.760 Because when they are mean to like their sibling, you might say, well, how do you frame that in

00:32:09.700 terms of the future of society as a big place?

00:32:11.680 And we frame that as they live in a society where most people are just going to let society

00:32:16.100 fall apart.

00:32:16.700 It is their personal responsibility to save the direction our civilization is going.

00:32:23.420 And as such, they have a unique role to play in human history, every one of our kids.

00:32:28.420 And that when they treat their siblings bad, I say, these are the only people that are really

00:32:34.200 there to support you at the end of the day, you know, family is family, right?

00:32:37.000 And this is something I was growing up being taught.

00:32:39.460 And that every one of you was born for something important.

00:32:42.560 So like when you go out there and you impede the development of your siblings, not only will

00:32:47.340 this come back to haunt you in the future and be something you regret, but you are impeding

00:32:51.260 the development of this team, which is going to matter so much in human history.

00:32:54.280 Now, obviously, explaining this to an adult, that sounds very complicated, more just to

00:32:59.840 a kid.

00:33:00.280 It's you have a very important role to play in history.

00:33:06.020 And we don't, I mean, that's, that's the natural conclusion that they'll come to when

00:33:09.760 they think about it more.

00:33:11.100 Really, all we're talking about is the future police, but the future police are the descendants

00:33:15.880 of their descendants, you know, thousands, if not millions of years in the future.

00:33:19.940 So they get it and they already care a lot about future generations just because of that,

00:33:26.020 just because of the nature of who these arbiters of gift giving and gift taking away are, right?

00:33:34.280 But I think the point is, and the important thing is that good religious concepts or good

00:33:40.220 moral concepts are not like a list of things you have to memorize, like the constitution or

00:33:46.200 the 10 commandments, they're seed crystals, which, okay.

00:33:49.940 So when you're making chocolate, for example, and you want to get a good crystalline structure,

00:33:53.880 you take a piece of like, you'll use a certain type of chocolate that has a really great crystalline

00:33:59.900 structure as your seed crystal, you'll put it in your melted chocolate, get it to the right

00:34:05.160 temperature.

00:34:05.520 And then that seed crystal will help the rest of the chocolate just lock into space.

00:34:09.440 It's not like the, into that same crystalline structure.

00:34:12.280 So it's not as though each piece of chocolate has to be taught how to behave the right way.

00:34:17.720 It is that a concept is so powerful that it can just help everything else lock into place.

00:34:23.000 And I think that, for example, what would Jesus do is great for that.

00:34:26.480 And that's what we're trying to riff with, which with the future police, right?

00:34:30.220 Yeah.

00:34:30.500 Yeah.

00:34:30.680 But the problem was that what would Jesus do is then you have to say, well, then what

00:34:34.140 would Jesus do?

00:34:35.300 Right.

00:34:35.520 And there's societal conceptions of Jesus.

00:34:37.740 There's biblical conceptions of Jesus.

00:34:39.520 And then there's, I think, wishy thinking conceptions of Jesus, i.e.

00:34:44.280 Jesus is love.

00:34:46.080 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:34:46.660 There are too many people corrupting the concept of Jesus.

00:34:49.540 You can go to the biblical interpretation, but the problem with the biblical interpretation

00:34:52.480 is it can just become a list of traits, right?

00:34:55.680 Yeah, well, and it's hard to even know the context in which he was making his decisions.

00:34:59.220 We're probably missing a lot in translation.

00:35:01.040 Yeah, a great example of that that I always go to that was really shaking for me is when

00:35:07.520 I went to Israel and I went to see the type of accommodation that Jesus would have been

00:35:13.820 like, like the people lived in around the time of Jesus.

00:35:17.160 Okay.

00:35:17.300 And what all of them looked like was sort of dugouts in sort of the wall of like a hill

00:35:21.140 where it was like a single room almost that was a house.

00:35:25.220 And then in the center, you would have a wall and on one side, you would have all of the

00:35:31.280 animals, you know, your chickens, your goats and stuff like that.

00:35:34.080 And on the other side, you would have the entire family that would sleep.

00:35:37.220 And these were large families, you know, be like 12 people or something like that, all

00:35:40.100 sleeping, basically laid out next to each other, mostly just to stay out of the rain.

00:35:43.660 Like these were not sophisticated dwellings.

00:35:45.320 People do not understand how early this was and how, you know, uncivilized sort of the rural

00:35:52.000 areas or the small towns in these regions where Jesus was born were.

00:35:56.280 And so, you know, if you read it in a modern context, you'd be like, oh, that's so horrible.

00:36:00.260 They put him in the manger.

00:36:01.740 They put him with the animals.

00:36:03.800 Like that must've been such a horrible thing to do, or like they must've had like nowhere

00:36:08.280 else to sleep.

00:36:09.360 But as soon as I saw one of these houses, I was like, oh, of course that's where you

00:36:13.840 would put travelers.

00:36:15.460 You know, the family is all sleeping on the other side.

00:36:18.780 You may not want to put them with the animals, but like, are you?

00:36:22.360 Putting them in the pile of like cousins and everything like that.

00:36:24.800 They're strangers. 0.99

00:36:25.460 They could like come up and murder everyone or something like that. 0.99

00:36:27.740 Right?

00:36:27.900 Like maybe not everyone would put them in, in the, the animal section.

00:36:32.040 But it certainly wouldn't be an absurd thing to do.

00:36:35.140 It's the only other part of the house other than the room where people sleep.

00:36:39.000 That's fair.

00:36:39.780 And it just recontextualized that like, I hadn't understood what was happening in that story.

00:36:45.280 I thought that it was a unique condition of poverty or like a uniquely weird or cruel thing

00:36:51.700 to do.

00:36:52.560 Well, then how many other elements of Jesus life are we totally not understanding correctly?

00:36:56.680 So yeah.

00:36:57.940 Yeah.

00:36:58.220 Anyway.

00:36:58.800 So that is what I'm thinking of for our kids in terms of like how we create this moral

00:37:04.420 seed for them to fight against what's going on within the online context.

00:37:07.800 But I would encourage other people to come up with other moral seeds or maybe other moral

00:37:11.420 lists or other moral, just like be aware because when I see these people who lose everything,

00:37:19.240 what happens is, is they, they are growing up in either secular families or families that

00:37:23.420 are like tangentially religious these days.

00:37:25.980 And your argument, basically, if I were to sum everything up is, even if you think that

00:37:31.520 you're atheistic or whatever it may be, super soft cultural framework works, one, you may

00:37:38.600 be discounting how morally brainwashed you already are based on an upbringing you brought

00:37:45.000 in which you were non-consensually given a religious moral framework without yourself

00:37:49.440 knowing.

00:37:49.860 But also in order to combat this, people have to have a strong internal self model that is

00:37:56.560 optimizing around something other than a, a, a vain archetype or laziness or just feeling

00:38:05.640 good.

00:38:06.200 And you, you can't just hope that they're going to build that archetype themselves.

00:38:12.640 They need to have something that gets them there.

00:38:14.940 Is that your, the gist of your argument?

00:38:16.400 Yes, but the core point I'd like want to end on, because I think this is really, really

00:38:22.600 important is a lot of people are going out there thinking that if they just raise their

00:38:28.980 kids without a strong cultural framework, whether that's a religious or secular one,

00:38:33.080 like, like they're taking a wishy or washy perspective on religion than their parents

00:38:36.020 did, like God is love or something like that, or a more secular perspective than the past,

00:38:40.680 that their kids will convergently come to the same value systems that they will.

00:38:44.560 And that their kids' childhoods are broadly the same as their childhoods.

00:38:49.680 That is not the case.

00:38:52.720 If you do not raise your kids with some value system that is hard, logically sought through

00:38:59.560 and reinforced through traditions and framings, those kids are going to get sucked into one

00:39:06.360 of these organically formed cults that have bubbled up within online spaces in both the left

00:39:11.800 and the right. I would go so far as to say most humans today who are growing up are being sucked 0.97

00:39:17.320 into radical and dangerous online cults. And when you begin to frame them this way, when you begin

00:39:23.880 to see that some of these movements are not just self-help movements, but they are defining an entire

00:39:30.520 world framework for viewing your own actions, for viewing reality, and for viewing what is moral and

00:39:36.680 what is immoral and how an individual should make decisions, then you are seeing that they are

00:39:41.720 through not even a set of maliciousness, but just because no other internally consistent system that

00:39:47.720 kids could really cling to was provided that kids grab onto this. But you know, kids these days are like,

00:39:54.200 you know, they're after a shipwreck and they're holding on to the boards of an old religious tradition,

00:40:00.200 often, or a secular tradition that came with like a little bit of what their parents have passed down to

00:40:04.280 them. Then the storm comes and the boards pushed away and they're grabbing at anything. And they

00:40:10.200 will grab at these systems because these systems have, of course, organically evolved to fit this

00:40:15.800 market niche of kids grabbing at anything. And the more malevolent often, or more psychologically

00:40:22.680 harmful one of these systems is, the more it will be focused at preventing deconversion once somebody

00:40:28.280 converts. So you cannot wait until you see the warning signs for your kids. You know,

00:40:32.280 you need to go into parenthood thinking about all of this. And parents are so worried about the stupid 1.00

00:40:38.360 stuff, you know, breastfeeding. 1.00

00:40:40.200 Yeah, like, well, or gendered bathrooms, which it's just been done, but it's not that. 0.93

00:40:45.080 And like, if parents did half the fucking effort they've been on, like, breastfeeding 0.90

00:40:49.080 and screen time, and like, oh, is my kid, like, looking at, I don't know, porn or something, like, that stuff matters 0.97

00:40:56.920 so little compared to the cultural groups that are building your kids' moral frameworks,

00:41:03.000 which is what you are not thinking about.

00:41:04.840 Word.

00:41:06.840 Anyway, I love you to death, Simone. This has been an

00:41:09.400 entertaining conversation. And I guess we will be test pilots for our kids.

00:41:13.080 And even though we're putting the track series on hold, I think that this is

00:41:16.200 pretty much as good of the track as you're going to get. I mean, I like this more than a lot of the tracks that we did.

00:41:20.600 And I, this to me, I know it won't do well because I found this to be a uniquely meaningful episode to me.

00:41:25.480 So whenever you feel like you, you really got something out of the conversation, then you think.

00:41:30.520 Or the idea, this was like riffing on a conversation that we had this morning.

00:41:33.400 So a lot of these ideas came from Simone. And I just, you know, when I talk with you, it helps me

00:41:39.240 build these. So I really appreciate that, Simone.

00:41:41.960 Oh, thanks, Malcolm. I enjoyed our walk today, getting deals at the dollar store.

00:41:46.760 Oh, yes. We do our regular post-holiday

00:41:51.240 cleanup of everything that's on sale.

00:41:53.640 Yeah. There's nothing like a 50% off deal at a dollar store.

00:42:00.600 50% off deals at the dollar store.

00:42:02.920 Yeah. So you know how we're cheap. All right. Love you, gorgeous.

00:42:06.360 Love you.

00:42:08.600 Yeah, sorry. It's the WhatsApp thread with my dad where I told him how Torsten rubs the rocks along his face.

00:42:14.440 Oh, God.

00:42:15.880 And my dad says he might be onto something there. There's thousands of years of perceived

00:42:20.440 technology involved with crystals and stone types of healing, or no, being healing.

00:42:26.280 Is our whole anti-mystic thing just a rebellion against our parents?

00:42:30.200 He's already, yeah, we're anti-mystics because our parents are like, oh yeah, well, no, that's,

00:42:34.840 you know, legitimate healing. And our son is going to be an anti, an anti-mom mystic.

00:42:41.560 Yeah. He's a pro-mystic. He's a, he's a pro-mystic. He's already into the stones.

00:42:46.840 The worst kind of crystals kind of rubbing crystals on his face.

00:42:51.240 He does it in such a manic way where he's like, ha ha. I think that's, I mean, honestly,

00:42:56.040 if you're going to be a crystal person, you should do it the way that.

00:42:59.720 All the way with it?

00:43:00.600 Yeah.

00:43:01.160 Yeah.

00:43:01.960 Okay.

00:43:02.280 Okay.

Based Camp - April 05, 2024

How Online Echo Chambers Can Turn into Cults & How to Protect Kids

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript