How Online Echo Chambers Can Turn into Cults & How to Protect Kids
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about cults and how they form organically within online spaces, and how we can protect our kids from growing up in a cult-like environment. We also talk about the dangers of self-replicating cults, and why we should be worried about them.
Transcript
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just fascinating to watch cults organically form within online spaces, or if you want to use a
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other than cults, self-replicating memetic clusters with negative psychological effects.
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When they deconvert from religious systems, they don't realize that all they did was stop
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believing in God. But they were still raised with those values. So they assume that what
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their morality is, is just their morality. When, in fact, they spent their entire lives being raised
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either within their church community or in a community very colored by their church community,
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and then they don't realize that if they raise their children in an absence of that,
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they assume that they're just going to come to the same conclusions that they have. But no,
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they're not being raised in that religious community.
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Yeah, this is a natural human inclination to develop some model that they personally aspire to.
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And when you don't have something like a religious framework that has a level of
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authority for you, you can begin thinking, okay, well, then who am I? And if you don't know who
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you are, then you're like, the most important part of me is of a man or a woman.
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Hello, Simone. I am so excited about our episode today. This is a really interesting one. Because
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recently, I have been going down a rabbit hole of the different ways people go crazy on
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It's so depressing. It's so depressing. I can't, how can you manage this?
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Oh, well, you know, I grew up loving cults, right? And it was something that I studied in a lot of
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detail. I was very interested in how groups of people could come to believe things
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about the world that obviously weren't true, but that these things could have huge sort of
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psychological effects on them, huge physiological effects on them. Because, you know, the power of
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suggestion is incredibly strong. And as I've gotten older, I have become less interested in
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intentionally created malevolent cults. Because, you know, you can learn a lot about those and
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they're interesting, but more related in if all of these techniques can be utilized by a specific
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individual with malevolent or even positive means. Like, I try to take some of these techniques and
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use them on myself to actually improve mental health. Like, if they can be used to control an
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individual, then if you have the full rule book in front of you, can you use them to control yourself?
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And can these techniques then accidentally get picked up by memetic clusters and create
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sort of organically formed cults? And this is something we've talked about in a few of our
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episodes, like, you know, psychology become a cult has the, in which we argue that the modern
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practice of psychology today is actually more similar in structure to what people called
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Scientology in the 80s, than what people call clinical psychology in the 80s.
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In terms of its techniques and stuff like that. And I don't think there was any malevolent intent.
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I think that just techniques that did a better job building dependency ended up competing in
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the ones that didn't. Or was in like, is the trans movement hiding a cult? You know, that episode
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where we talk about that, which is to say that if you create a group of people where within large
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portions of society, you cannot in any way question them, then it creates, and this is also, I think,
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what happened with psychology. Like, it was like, oh, how dare you question that person for seeing a
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psychologist? Because you created this group that you couldn't question, just memetically speaking,
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it's very likely that toxic memes that build dependency will begin to cluster and create sort
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of organically formed cults within these contexts.
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Well, this all gets very interesting. So you're like, why do I find it fascinating? Why do I study
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Yeah, despite how depressing and depressing it seems to be.
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It's just fascinating to watch cults organically form within online spaces. Or if you want to use
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the word other than cults, self-replicating memetic clusters with negative psychological effects.
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Right. Yeah. Oh, actually, yeah. Okay. And to think about it from a utility perspective,
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in regards to our kids. How do we protect our kids from the internet driving them crazy?
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So the first thing I want to note here is it's something that I've been reflecting on a lot recently,
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is historically, if you are a religious person, like the lowest IQ, or at least what I would have
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thought historically, like the lowest IQ religious attack on atheist communities was, if you don't
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have God, then you don't have morality. Right? And then the atheist community would flip the back
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and say, oh, well, if you're only doing what's right, like if you're not out there murdering people
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just because you're afraid of punishments after death or for rewards after death, then you don't
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actually have morality at all. Then I have meaningful morality because I'm not killing people because
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I'm a good person. Right? You... And this sounded really well and good, I think, for the first
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generation of atheists. The problem is the society is becoming so secular now that I think what I'm
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beginning to see is a lot of even growing up secular. You know, I was raised atheist in an atheist family.
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Growing up secular, I didn't fully appreciate how many of the moral subsets I assumed were just sort
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of convergent and obvious moral systems are not convergent and obvious moral systems.
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Well, but here's the thing is, I think if they were, we would not need culture and religion. If all
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that stuff came naturally to us, we wouldn't need this additional software running on top of our
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hardware, as you point out in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion.
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So yeah, so there's two illusions which create the belief that they are convergent and obvious
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systems. One is, is that they are, there are convergent cultural strategies that lead to success
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when you're talking about competition between communities. That could sound very complicated,
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but I'll expand on this concept a bit. If you look at the successful cultural slash religious books,
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what we'd call the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion cultivars, these are sort of memetic
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clusters, which positively augment the fitness of the individuals who hold them, i.e. the number
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of surviving offspring that they have, and that that is how they compete with other clusters,
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and that they have out-competed other clusters, there's obviously going to be some level of convergent
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evolution among those. Meaning that those clusters that have done well look similar cross-culturally.
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You know, whether or not you're talking about Islam or Christianity or Buddhism or, you know,
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Confucianism, like you'll see some level of convergence across these. And it's because
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similar moral frameworks tend to out-compete the moral frameworks of their neighbors in terms of
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the individuals who hold them. However, this doesn't actually tell us anything about a true
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human convergent set of morality. If you look at the diversity of religious practices,
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like if you study religious practices in an anthropological context, i.e. the religious
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practices that exist among uncontacted tribes or among human groups that like just show what
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humans come to when humans are stranded on an island and coming up with a moral and religious system on
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their own or early, you know, there was huge diversity of these in Africa, huge diversity or some
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diversity in India. And we can study these early contact writings and see what this diversity actually
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looked like. Or again, look at the uncontacted people today. You do not see this common morality.
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If someone's not in your group, it's typically okay to kill them. You know, infanticide is really
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common. Grape is really common. A lot of things that we just think of like, oh, this is like normal
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human morality you don't see in those. And in fact, you can even see remnants of this in early
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biblical scripture before it got a chance to reach this convergent state where you will see things
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like claims of infanticide being a good thing. Like when you conquer a settlement, you know,
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smash the babies on rocks, right? Like this is something that we see captured like this early,
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almost sort of like pre-Christian mindset, not pre-Christian, pre-Judeo, pre-Abrahamic mindset
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captured very early Abrahamic texts that may have been, you know, pollution from nearby cultural
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groups, or it may have even been a practice in the group that led to it. And I actually would argue
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that it is because this form of infanticide is pretty common in things like gorillas,
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which we, you know, may be related to, and in chimpanzees. After they kill the males in a tribe
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and take over a group of women to get them ovulating again, they'll kill the infants. So
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there's probably some sort of like pre-coded genetic reason for doing this. The point I'm making here
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is that just because a lot of the successful cultures do something doesn't mean that all humans
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who like sit down and think about it are going to come to that same conclusion.
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The second issue is, is that the further we got from religious society, what, what I think we're
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realizing. And so when you talked to me about this was that a lot of people, when they deconvert from
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religious systems, they don't realize that all they did was stop believing in God, but they were
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still raised with those values. So they assume that what their, their morality is, is just their
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morality. When in fact they spent their entire lives being raised either within their church
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community or in a community very colored by their church community. And then they don't realize that
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if they raise their children in an absence of that, they assume that they're just going to come to the
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same conclusions that they have, but no, they're not being raised in that religious community.
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Yeah, not at all. Like a great example of this is, is the turn the other cheek mentality from
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Christian communities. This is specifically something that I think was one of the early teachings
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that philosophically helped Christianity out-compete some of its, its competitors at the time. And
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that is not found in many other traditions or many non-convergent traditions. So if you go
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in an anthropological context and you're looking at like island tribes and stuff like that,
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this idea of turn the other cheek is not a natural human idea. It is, it is actually very rare
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that it appears, but when it does appear, the communities that appears within tend to out-compete
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the communities that don't. Wait, why does, wait, hold on. Why do you think turning the other
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cheek is more evolutionarily competitive? Because it lowers unnecessary conflict between
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communities? Oh yes. You're not getting these blood flutes, blood flutes, blood feuds and wars that
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can kill a lot of people in the end. Yeah. When you talk about this, blood feuds are uniquely
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uncommon in all of the Christian descendant communities. I find blood feuds in most other
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cultures in the world, which is, which is, it shows that it is effective at achieving like what
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the cultural technology has meant to do. How interesting is that? Anyway. Okay. So we're
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continuing to, to go down just the framing rabbit hole and we're already 11. I gotta be, I gotta get
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out of just framing here, but I'm, I'm framing that we are now seeing, uh, in a place where I've been
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just having a blast learning about this as a YouTuber called Turkey Tom, who goes into sort of how
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various people have sort of been driven crazy by the internet. I mean, he would see it as just how
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have these people gone crazy, but he's doing it by documenting from often when they started as sort
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of sane, more normal internet people, the communities they were engaging with and how those communities
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sort of broke them. And what's really interesting with people for me is looking at like, what's their
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objective purpose or their objective value system. And this, we call it intrinsic, what is it? An
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objective function in the book, the pragmatist guide to life, which is to say, what is like the core
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intrinsic good that you are searching for in life? Like what's the thing that's driving your decisions
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in life? And within religious systems, these are often spelled out pretty strongly. When people first
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leave religious systems within like gen one of leaving the religious system, um, and within many
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smooth brains, but, but, but once he's still sort of like broad utilitarianism works here. Now people
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like just distribute happiness at a, uh, it's sort of as much as you can reduce suffering as much as
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you can on like a societal basis. The reason why I think that this ends up getting elevated in this
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sort of first post system, there's a very easy to understand moral framework, even if it's not a very
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logical moral framework, like there isn't a good reason for it. The things that make us happy and make
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us feel bad. If you're approaching this from secular mindset are just the things that our ancestors who
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experienced had more surviving offspring. So they're not like, and also in the absence of
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abundance. So it still didn't work. Yeah. And when they get elevated in societies where
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if on, if the average person on society is a hedonist and you needed to sort of democratize
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hedonism where hedonism is like their core, most animal level coding, um, I just do things that make
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me happy. And when I say happy, I don't mean necessarily pleasure. I mean that fulfill the broad range of
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positive emotional subsets that humans can experience. Then society is going to agree on
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sort of a detente. This will be our moral framework to fit this most animalistic human individual moral
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framework. Like what do I want for my life? I just want to feel good. And in one of the Turkey Tom
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videos, you can see an individual who completely succumbs to hedonism as a moral framework. And this is on
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the clown gooning or something. One, just type in like clown gooning Turkey Tom and it'll come up.
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And it shows how when you strive primarily for personal hedonism, which is what ended up happening
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to this generation. Cause I think a generation of utilitarians raises a generation of hedonists.
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Well, because utilitarianism is, is bad at conveying why you should sacrifice to people
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outside of people was like intense self-control. And since a lot of people don't have that and they
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really are just doing what they're doing, or at least a good chunk of society is just doing what
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they're doing out of fear of some sort of like reparations in the afterlife or something like
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that. Then, yeah, because I think the thing I'd say is, you know how dumb the average person is?
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Do you know how little self-control the average person has? Well, 50% have less self-control
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and less intelligence than that. So you've got to keep in mind at a society level, when you move
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away from these things, what's going to be the consequences. And for this individual, you know,
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it's, it's all sorts of PDA file stuff. It's all sorts of just, and, and I think in a quest for
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hedonism, something that people missed in a quest for hedonism is there's two other factors to hedonism
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that are outside of just, I want to feel, by the way, do you have any thoughts here before I go
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further? No, no, go ahead. I agree with what you're saying.
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There's two other core factors to hedonism outside of just like, I want to feel good,
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like, like emotional context that really drive human behavioral patterns. The first is
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self-narrative. This is the narrative you craft about who you are as a person and feeling comfortable
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with this sense of self or identity of self, like self-affirmation, I guess I'd call this.
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And I think that the perversion of the self-affirmation narrative is where the gender
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cults come from. So by this, I would mean some iterations of the trans movement, but also things
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like the Tate, like, like some iterations of like red pillism, you know, I don't want to say that all
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like Tate followers fall into this. There's definitely different factions, but there's some
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faction that is just like trying to masculine, like, like, like completely embody a masculine archetype,
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which to me is just as much a showcase of like gender dysphoria and uncomfortableness with your
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gender and a belief that gender alignment is the core moral purpose of an individual's life.
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In other words, they're showing the same level of desperation or fervor with a specific gender
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archetype signaling that many trans people show, right? Whereas most people don't care about that.
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There's something else, which is more interesting to me, which is that yes, but they are placing it
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on a moral pedestal. It is driving major life decisions for them, i.e. how a gender ideal and
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fitting a gender ideal begins to develop what would in a historic context of morality would fit. Like
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when I am judging between like, should I do X or should I do Y in a historic context,
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you would go to your religion or some sort of philosophically derived moral framework.
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I mean, here's how you describe it in the pragmatist guide to life. Once you establish
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your objective function, the thing or things that you want to maximize in your life, then your
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responsibility is to build a model of yourself that maximizes those things. And I think people
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subtly do that when they are religious and when they have moral frameworks, because they ask things
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like, what would Jesus do? Or what would a good Christian do in this situation? And it does influence
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who they are. But when your internal model is not of a good Christian or some kind of personal
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personality that would optimize your objective function, the things you want to maximize most in
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your life, it could just be, I'm a manly man. And then yes, like you say, all-
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What would Jesus do? What would a man do? Or what would a woman do?
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How would a really manly man react to this situation? Which I think you can see a lot with
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No, no, no, no. There is a spiral in the woman's side of this. And we'll do a whole separate video
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about this where women have started shaming country girls for being like, for like building houses and
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like noodling catfish, which is like catching the catfish with their hands, you know, and being in
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other ways masculine. And I am not here for that. I am a, I am a tomboy appreciator. And I, I, that is
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one thing that is the greatest threat. And we need to talk about this, that the, the tomboy drought
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Don't take away my tomboys. Get your hands off my tomboys.
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Oh, by the way, for people who are from the U.S. and may not know this, this is a girl who
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otherwise has masculine hobbies and doesn't take no, doesn't-
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Wait, it is tomboy, right? A tomboy is a girl or young woman who has masculine traits such as
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wearing androgynous clothing or participating in activities typically associated with boys or men.
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Tomboys may also enjoy things some people think are more suited to boys, such as playing physical
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But anyway, so the point I was making here is that this is a natural human inclination
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to develop some model that they personally aspire to.
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And when you don't have something like a religious framework that has a level of authority for you,
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you can begin thinking, okay, well, then who am I?
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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.
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Or it could be, I kind of identify with foxes. I guess I'm a fox now.
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Well, Andy, you weren't against this in the program with Schedule Life. I don't know if you remember,
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but you argued that the worst and most dangerous type of thing to optimize around,
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objective function, which many people come to by default, is an identity.
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Well, and, and, and, you know, when I'm talking about the failure of like, like falling apart
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of religious communities, I need to point out, I am not just calling out secular life here.
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Many individuals who still call themselves Christians.
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Yeah. They're like, I still believe in God, but you know, I just don't go to church anymore.
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And the most common reason that Christians stop going to church now, if you believe it,
00:20:07.540
These religions evolved as packages, not just, it wasn't just a belief in God and a moral system.
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It was also going to church and everything like that.
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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,
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no, no, I do not think the historic traditions on their own can survive, but I think that there's
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another type of tradition, which is the historic traditions are at least stronger than this
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Where it's like, I still really believe in God.
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I just don't do all of the other rituals that came along with this and the other things that
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And it's like, well, it turned out that those had a purpose and that's why your kid now
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But no, it matters because you've got to ask, well, why is this happening to young people?
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How do you create a system that protects against this?
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I want to say here, I have nothing against furries as a community.
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Like if you want to get off on that, if you want to treat this as a hobby, like that is
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But there is a portion of the community where this has become a moral system and a religion
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Like it combines with their cosmological view of reality.
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And to call this anything other than, I guess, a cult, like an organically evolved cult out
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of people who liked pictures of humans as animals, like what else do you call this, right?
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It's an organically evolved cult, which is fascinating.
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So that's one area, but you see this across the board.
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If you only see this in the left, then you don't see it in the right.
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You do not see the girls who primarily identify with like trad wives.
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Like that is not a useful moral framework, right?
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Like that has no higher philosophical authority to it, nor any sort of old authority to it.
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And it will lead to toxicity in relationships, even though they are choosing an old model
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or the guys who are like the ultra red pillars who are like, I define myself as male and I
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define like my actions and the choices I make and the hobbies I undertake as what are male
00:22:10.420
But there's the final one, which is of like the core human internal drives, which is another
00:22:20.920
And the Turkey Tom video that goes into this is on the guy, just look up like Turkey Tom
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And just to be clear, Turkey Tom is a YouTuber who covers things like this.
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So this, he did a video on, and the murder spree that this guy ended up going on.
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So maybe Turkey Tom, Ember murder, because he ended up killing three people.
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And this was an individual who was driven crazy, basically, because he decided to base his entire
00:22:54.820
Typically affirmation was an online spaces and stuff like that.
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And a lot of people can be like, that's a crazy thing to build your identity around.
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And it's like, come on, if you can just emulate your teenage self affirmation from the world,
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especially within online spaces where affirmation is intrinsically elevated.
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Within an online community, the people you hear from more are intrinsically the people who are
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affirmed by others more, because that's how pretty much all the algorithms work.
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People tend to be, we, like AI, respond to reinforcement learning.
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So when you get reinforced for something, obviously, you're going to move in that direction.
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And that's why when I met you, you found me walking around in redfish net stockings and
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weird clothing and acting a certain way, because that's what got the most affirmation.
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And whether it was positive or negative, because some people can't easily
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I mean, people would never take me seriously, professionally,
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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.
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And the human mind is pretty socially sensitive in most cases, at least on average.
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
00:24:31.900
Like if their friends show disgust towards them, they're going to react to that much more
00:24:37.040
And so when people are building their identities, when people are most common to leave a religion
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
00:24:54.020
So if you throw kids into this environment without a strong counter signal,
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.
00:25:23.340
So then this brings me to a couple of questions.
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
00:25:57.660
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,
00:26:25.560
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
00:26:41.360
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
00:26:58.160
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.
00:27:06.760
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.
00:27:35.040
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.
00:27:48.200
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
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
00:28:37.060
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
00:28:57.600
So, you know, I'm a rag on the concept of saints sometimes, but you've got to think about
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.
00:29:31.800
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.
00:29:39.320
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?
00:29:49.380
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.
00:30:12.040
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
00:30:23.220
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
00:30:42.840
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
00:30:53.960
But that means that they had the capability of picking up tons of baggage that may not
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.
00:31:16.000
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
00:31:35.520
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?
00:31:42.180
And we're like, well, the future police, like we have to, you know, do what they want, right?
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
00:32:11.680
And we frame that as they live in a society where most people are just going to let society
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
00:33:00.280
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
00:33:11.100
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
00:34:05.520
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?
00:34:30.680
But the problem was that what would Jesus do is then you have to say, well, then what
00:34:39.520
And then there's, I think, wishy thinking conceptions of Jesus, i.e.
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
00:34:55.680
Yeah, well, and it's hard to even know the context in which he was making his decisions.
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.
00:35:17.300
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.
00:35:45.320
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.
00:36:03.800
Like that must've been such a horrible thing to do, or like they must've had like nowhere
00:36:09.360
But as soon as I saw one of these houses, I was like, oh, of course that's where you
00:36:15.460
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.
00:36:25.460
They could like come up and murder everyone or something like that.
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.
00:36:39.780
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
00:36:52.560
Well, then how many other elements of Jesus life are we totally not understanding correctly?
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
00:37:25.980
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
00:37:49.860
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
00:38:06.200
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.
00:38:16.400
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.
00:38:52.720
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
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
00:40:40.200
Yeah, like, well, or gendered bathrooms, which it's just been done, but it's not that.
00:40:45.080
And like, if parents did half the fucking effort they've been on, like, breastfeeding
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
00:40:56.920
so little compared to the cultural groups that are building your kids' moral frameworks,
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.
00:41:53.640
Yeah. There's nothing like a 50% off deal at a dollar store.
00:42:02.920
Yeah. So you know how we're cheap. All right. Love you, gorgeous.
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.
00:42:15.880
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.