Based Camp - Mapping the Progression of Human Mindsets： A Framework for Understanding Personal Development

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone. Today, we are going to do one of those episodes that excites me so much. I have

00:00:07.060 put so much effort into today's content, and I know it will do horrible in the algorithm,

00:00:12.680 but it's a development of my view of the world further, where I feel that because of this

00:00:19.880 revelation I've had, where I'm like, oh, now I understand things better when I have systematized

00:00:25.120 them in this way. So it's like a paradigm shift. Yeah, a mild paradigm shift for me. Yeah.

00:00:31.700 Yeah. Okay. And it actually came from reading about a theory that I find very distasteful,

00:00:39.840 which is spiral dynamics. So I ended up, because it was a paradigm shift, I wanted to write it down.

00:00:44.700 So I'll read what I've written down and we can talk about it. Okay. Like I used to do with the tracks.

00:00:48.720 Sounds good. Yeah. Would you like to know more? The ideal spiral dynamics has come up a few times

00:00:54.940 when talking to fans. And since then, I have noticed some related channels like HoMath,

00:01:00.480 WhatIfAltHist, and Brittany Simon, delineating level systems for how people evolve in their

00:01:06.080 thinking. Anyone who knows us knows how viscerally negatively we would react to such a system at

00:01:12.060 first glance, given that humans seem to have a natural inclination to categorize themselves and

00:01:17.520 others based on simplistic criteria. If you don't understand why this would create a negative reaction,

00:01:23.000 just watch any video on spiral dynamics and watch the person explaining the concept, happily

00:01:27.880 classifying leaders of the political opposition to their beliefs among the examples of the lower

00:01:32.880 order mindsets. All spiral dynamics really gets right is a broad ordering of the very lowest levels

00:01:39.420 of personal development and then transitions into a moral and religious system at most of the two tier

00:01:45.360 systems and beyond. Though I suppose it is only axiomatic that an individual cannot accurately predict

00:01:51.140 mindsets that are above their own. Thus, if they are at a relatively low level of personal development,

00:01:57.520 we'll just project a mystical pseudo-religious worldview as being the higher order mindset.

00:02:03.380 However, despite dismissing these systems early on, I began to think more about the ways humans

00:02:09.060 relate to reality, a life well lived, and a self-conception about how those systems build upon

00:02:16.320 others. And it helped me realize that there is a real way to build out such a map. However,

00:02:21.740 the two keys to doing this that others have missed is that this is not a line, but a branching tree of

00:02:29.700 life philosophies that sometimes, in fact, frequently has a mindset that is strictly worse than its

00:02:36.700 progenitor. By this, what I mean is the mindsets don't get better as they go further along the path.

00:02:43.180 Would you describe mindsets in this model that you're going to go into deeper, of course? Is

00:02:51.340 straying from the path or straying from an ideal scenario when they get further along?

00:02:57.140 I'll give an example, which I have written in the next sentence. For example, we would argue that a

00:03:01.380 strict deontological religious world perspective, which is one of the earliest mindsets, is also one

00:03:07.180 of the most mentally healthy and intellectually sophisticated. For this reason, we draw our map of

00:03:13.160 mindsets with a quote-unquote waterline, with the sophistication and mental health associated with

00:03:19.380 a mindset being determined by where it is along the waterline. So if you think of this like a

00:03:26.460 line graph that then ends up branching, there is a waterline, and some nodes of the line are below

00:03:32.940 the waterline, some are above the waterline, some are below the waterline. Okay? Now, before I go

00:03:38.800 further, have you heard of Spiral Dynamics? Do you know broadly what I'm talking about here when I'm

00:03:42.720 talking about these level systems for understanding how people think? I've learned it about five times,

00:03:47.080 and then each time I learn about it, I completely forget about it because that's what I do when I

00:03:51.620 come across information I disregard as not being useful. I don't maintain space for it. Can you-

00:03:57.460 And that's the way I was, and that's what sort of caused this breakthrough for me, is just having

00:04:02.100 my face shoved in it again and again recently. And eventually, my distaste for how stupid the

00:04:08.640 predominant theories in this space are became shadowed by the, oh, but you probably actually

00:04:16.100 could build a system like this that works mindset. Interesting. Huh. Okay.

00:04:21.000 So that's where, because I kept seeing things. It was like, no, if you really wanted to do it,

00:04:25.180 you would actually probably go to this and this. I see. I should point out that with this system,

00:04:30.780 single individuals don't necessarily need to pass from one node to another node within the system,

00:04:36.460 but a society might. So if you start at one node, you can often, like within your larger society,

00:04:43.080 you can often process further on your own. And that most societies, and I'll get to a point in the

00:04:50.820 graph, and I'll say, this is the node that is a starting node for most people born in a Western

00:04:55.720 society right now. Can you start by giving the Cliff Notes version of Spiral Dynamics as it is

00:05:01.260 interpreted by the mainstream? With Spiral Dynamics, really all it is very basic. Human society progresses

00:05:08.820 through these various mindsets, which they're right about for the first three mindsets. And then it turns

00:05:14.880 into like mystical, religious mumbo jumbo, basically. And it's this spiral, but you're

00:05:20.460 describing it as a sort of linear. Ignore the word spiral. Just think of it as an upwards line.

00:05:25.440 Okay. They have some things where they call it a spiral because they see certain themes repeat

00:05:30.880 as societies develop. And they're like, oh, and society oscillates between this mindset and this

00:05:36.860 mindset as it moves to higher phases. However, I think most of this is just an artifact of how the

00:05:42.680 map was constructed. And I don't think that they're actually noticing something that's

00:05:46.800 real in the ways humans develop because they are only through one spiral, i.e. one cycle,

00:05:54.780 when they get to the end of their accurate observations before they get into their pseudo-religious

00:05:59.880 observations. Okay. That's important because people who follow this podcast will know that you love

00:06:05.840 what you call spiral energy. And now they're learning that you hate what you call spiral dynamics. And it

00:06:11.860 might be a little bit confusing. And we can do another future video going deep into why spiral

00:06:16.900 dynamics are the bad theory. But I don't like feel, I don't think that's necessary to understand

00:06:21.820 the concepts that we're doing here. And I think that most intelligent people, when they look at

00:06:25.640 spiral dynamics, they're like, oh, that's an interesting model. But obviously it's being

00:06:29.060 affected by these people's priors. If I may then for the audience, what I would say is if you're not

00:06:34.260 familiar with spiral dynamics, what I've heard from Malcolm about this so far, although I'm coming into

00:06:38.840 this mostly not knowing what he's going to say, is that what it seems like Malcolm is describing here

00:06:43.720 is Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but if it starts at self-actualization.

00:06:50.040 My system goes way past self-actualization, which is another problem with a lot of the historic

00:06:54.580 systems. Yeah. But in other words, thematically, what we're talking about is what humans do

00:06:59.040 after they've met all their basic human needs. Yeah. The other thing that I'd note about a lot of

00:07:05.000 level systems like Maslow's hierarchy of needs or spiral dynamics is that if people were, if all of

00:07:10.660 society was at the highest level, society wouldn't function. And to me, that means that's axiomatically

00:07:15.900 not the highest level you can be at. Is that just because no one's working on the stuff that needs

00:07:19.640 to be done? Yeah. Like in a society where everyone is turquoise, or a society where everyone is at

00:07:25.300 Maslow's idea of self-actualization is a very non-efficacious society. So to me, that just clearly

00:07:33.180 means no, this isn't some in-state. It's their idea of what a priest caste should look like, which is

00:07:39.120 again, a theological position and not a factual position. That's a really good point. I appreciate

00:07:45.080 you're saying that. The world doesn't run on self-actualized people. Self-actualized gurus.

00:07:51.920 Yeah. All right. So for the very first of the states, this is a state that is in the branch tree,

00:07:58.900 which we call the lower tree that all of the other trees end up branching out of.

00:08:03.200 And I marked this at negative eight. So this scale goes from negative 10 to positive 10. So people in

00:08:07.740 this state have very little ability to engage with sophisticated ideas. And people generally start in

00:08:15.580 this state when they don't have their basic needs met. I call it animalism. Individuals who live within

00:08:20.340 this mental state are only motivated by base pre-evolved instincts that we share with other animals like

00:08:26.000 sexual desire and a desire for food. This mindset is virtually unseen outside of mentally handicapped

00:08:31.980 individuals and drug addicts. The next state, which I rate at negative five. So it's like you can

00:08:38.060 engage with some more complicated ideas, but it's still really deleterious to a person's mindscape.

00:08:42.840 I call perceptionalism. And you unlock the ability to have this mindset or move from animalism to

00:08:49.300 perceptualism when you are no longer living in fear of not having your basic needs met.

00:08:54.260 However, I should note here that one of the ways people move from this lower order state to

00:09:00.080 perceptualism is by deciding they don't need a particular need met. So basically, if you decide,

00:09:06.720 if you go from being red pill to MGTOW, you go from that first stage, negative eight to this next stage.

00:09:13.680 Yes. Yes. If you decide that sexuality is a need that you absolutely have, then you will stay in the

00:09:19.760 animalism stage until you can decide that you don't need that. That's not the most important thing to

00:09:25.420 you. And you'll see this was drug addicts. Like how does somebody move between the animalism stage

00:09:29.700 of drug addicts to begin to get out of it? They- They have to choose to go clean.

00:09:35.080 They have to- They have to choose to not need the basic need that previously was driving them.

00:09:39.740 Right. And this is where perceptualism, even though I view it as a fairly

00:09:43.400 unsophisticated and simple state, is very useful to people who are really struggling. It is the life

00:09:50.100 raft for people when they are deep in self-hatred or addiction or something like that, right? So

00:09:57.880 perceptualism. Individuals in this state optimize around a self-perception, usually an aesthetic ideal

00:10:04.100 like masculinity or a value they associate with high status like power, love, intellectual deepness,

00:10:10.300 etc. The individual then models their life around embodying this aesthetic ideal. A common mental

00:10:16.680 crutch used by perceptionalists to justify their mindset is not having some need met at a younger

00:10:23.460 age. For example, I was poor when I was young and thus I now live my entire life focused around the

00:10:28.720 accumulation of wealth or security of some sort. Obviously, it is not true that wealth equals morality

00:10:38.340 and we all get to choose what we optimize around. But this is a statement people will often make when

00:10:45.000 they want to avoid reflecting on how illogical their life path has become. Some perceptionalist

00:10:51.260 individuals will present as religious, but for them, religion serves to reinforce their self-perception.

00:10:58.060 For a stereotype of this kind of person, think of the white kid in college that converts to Buddhism

00:11:04.180 to maximize the aesthetic of spiritual depths and sophistication. For these individuals, their world

00:11:10.340 cosmology exists to service their self-perception and does not guide their decisions or view of morality.

00:11:19.540 So you've seen many people fall into the self-perceptionalism mindset. It is better than base level

00:11:27.020 animalism, but it is still a fairly unsophisticated mindset. Where you see it the most is when we often complain,

00:11:33.140 if you look at our videos of the gender dysphoria problem on the left and the right, where people

00:11:38.400 begin to identify associating with gendered stereotypes as a moral compass. And you will see some of these

00:11:46.600 masculinity influencers on the right ask themselves when they're making major life decisions, what is

00:11:51.520 the most masculine choice? Which is just an insane thing to do. To anyone who has any level of

00:11:57.900 intellectual sophistication, obviously masculinity is not a moral system. It is an aesthetic system.

00:12:04.160 It might lead to a healthier lifestyle than just acting on your basal actions. And you will actually

00:12:10.440 hear people in these systems talk when they're like, there's the two ways you can live. You can either

00:12:15.500 live the masculine way or you can live in hedonism. They are like literally unaware that any more

00:12:21.980 sophisticated mental frameworks exist above them. And that's something you regularly see

00:12:27.660 within individuals in this stage. Like my mom was very hard in the money equals morality framework,

00:12:35.480 or at least the person- No, just more money, more better.

00:12:38.660 More money, more better. And when I tried to mentally engage her, I was like, how does that

00:12:42.680 moral framework work? This moral framework makes no sense. She was really unaware or completely

00:12:48.740 dismissed the sophistication of any moral framework above this.

00:12:52.660 I think she just dismissed the concept of moral frameworks entirely, if we're being fair.

00:12:58.080 What she was able to do through this, I didn't have money when I was younger, therefore I'm not

00:13:02.960 going to think about anything higher order than this. And with Andrew Tate who falls into one of

00:13:07.060 these frameworks, although he might be transitioning to the next framework right now, we'll see with his

00:13:11.240 recent conversion to Islam, but he could have converted to Islam just because he saw it as the most

00:13:15.180 masculine religion, which is something he had said before, is there's a clip of him saying, I do

00:13:20.480 everything I do out of a fear of not having power because I have seen what it is like to not have power.

00:13:27.480 When people say to me, Tate, you're obsessed with money. I say, no, I'm obsessed with not being in that

00:13:32.480 position. I'm never going to let me live my only one life on this planet and waste my years of

00:13:39.360 consciousness in that position. I don't want to be the guy who's 37 driving a fucking shitty

00:13:45.180 Citroen who gets pulled out on and a girl who's too hot for me driving a car I can never afford,

00:13:50.360 who can call fucking dudes, psycho kickboxers with fucking Lambos and acids to turn up and bust me

00:13:57.500 up. I'm never going to be that guy. I'm never going to accept that submissive position. And that's

00:14:02.260 why I say when I talk about money and achievement and training and all these things and how important

00:14:06.060 they are, because if you don't find those things important, well, then you're just accepting your

00:14:09.700 place lower down. And I have seen what it is like to be on the lower end of society. So people in

00:14:13.880 this state are often motivated very heavily by fear. So is this the same as optimizing your life

00:14:20.020 around a certain identity? Yes. So an identity, money, perception of status within society, perception

00:14:28.460 of status within a society. So basically when your basic need, however illogical, shifts from an

00:14:35.720 animalistic based need to perhaps something more societal or resource based. Is that fair?

00:14:41.180 I say it's something aesthetic based is the way I word it. It's a morality designed around an

00:14:48.120 aesthetic. And by that, what I mean by aesthetic, that can mean many things depending on the social

00:14:52.780 context. So people can be like wealth isn't an aesthetic and it's actually wealth definitionally

00:14:58.060 differs between which culture you're in. And so you're really dealing with one culture's aesthetic of

00:15:02.540 what wealth means. Like it's usually not like numbers in a bank account that they're trying to

00:15:06.800 max. It is their perception of themselves as a wealthy person. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's not actually

00:15:11.900 the dollar signs. It's how you see yourself. Yeah. And they will spin their wealth in a way that's

00:15:16.320 meant to reinforce this self-perception of being a wealthy person. And then some people within this,

00:15:21.200 it's that they need other people to see them this way. But regardless of what it is, it's about

00:15:25.100 maximizing some self-perception. And there's some more complicated self-perceptions,

00:15:28.880 like I am intellectually deep and some more simple ones like a gender or something like that. Right.

00:15:36.420 Or just power. Right. So that is the second system. Okay. The realization that transitions to the next

00:15:44.240 stage is the realization how trivial a life designed around optimizing self-perception is because just

00:15:49.980 this is one of those systems where it's more sophisticated than just base animalism is just,

00:15:54.620 if you apply any level of reflection to it or any level of logic is just very obviously not

00:15:59.900 a intellectually satisfying moral system. And so the next system here is, I have it as five,

00:16:05.760 like positive five. So it's a huge. Oh, wow. So we're just, yeah. It's not like there's a one

00:16:10.720 number change with every new step. Yeah. And this step is one of the highest steps in terms of

00:16:17.140 intellectual sophistication and mental health of any step in the entire system. And these are

00:16:22.760 religious rule systems. So these systems are a stable set of self-reinforcing memes that lay out

00:16:29.660 a set of rules for how to live. Individuals subject to these systems build their lives, morality, and

00:16:35.520 behavior downstream of their theological system, following a strict set of rules given to them

00:16:41.740 by that system. This system generally leads to better mental health and better equips people to engage

00:16:47.460 with sophisticated philosophical concepts than any system presented outside of individuals born

00:16:53.740 in the top few percentage points of intellect and ability at self-reflection. So by that, what I mean

00:17:00.600 is if you are a person of below average intelligence, this system is almost always going to be the best

00:17:06.800 system for you. To be at this stage, a person is following a strict set of rules laid out by their

00:17:13.580 religion and does not ask why those specific rules exist. They simply accept that those rules are

00:17:20.360 good and that those who do not follow them are sinful. Thus, they would be said to have a

00:17:25.340 deontological ethical system. Most of these systems evolve to help some populations out-compete other

00:17:31.400 populations. For more on this series, see the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. However, an individual

00:17:36.760 blindly living by a complicated series of rules about how to live such as an extremely woke individual

00:17:43.720 may also be said to be living in one of these systems. This framework is where a lot of religions

00:17:51.860 are, especially a lot of religions are like if you were a medieval peasant, this is where you were.

00:17:57.800 You do not heavily engage with your religious system outside of it is just true and it is a set of rules

00:18:03.240 that determines right from wrong. However, not everyone in this is in one of these sorts of

00:18:08.060 religious systems. Some just have a personal honor system. Some have some sort of culturally derived

00:18:14.460 system that comes from their local peer group that they picked up in college because they got caught

00:18:19.160 in this self-stabilizing mimetic tornado. That's basically what causes these. And they are just

00:18:25.000 following a set of rules that define good and bad and right and wrong.

00:18:29.080 So I could see even like someone who just slavishly lives by like some bro code being caught up in

00:18:38.580 this. This isn't necessarily like someone being super Catholic or super Orthodox Jewish. It is

00:18:43.640 someone who just decides to live by rules or that's the code of a samurai. You know what I mean?

00:18:50.280 Yeah, exactly. That would be somebody living within one of these systems. And again, I should say

00:18:54.460 they're not all religious people are in the system, but religions are typically the best

00:18:57.540 explanation for these systems. Like when somebody is that woke that they have like this

00:19:02.620 cosmological framework created by it and a strict set of rules about what's sinful and what's not,

00:19:06.980 they may as well be in a religion. This system is passed when an individual or a group realizes the

00:19:13.160 serendipity of rich religious system you were born into or the silliness of assuming your generation

00:19:18.680 exists at a moral nexus in history and that the morals, rules, and cosmologies that are common

00:19:23.900 among your birth group, your generation, or your peer group are largely serendipitous and unlikely

00:19:30.180 to align with a true moral North star. As we say at the beginning of the Pragmatist Guide to Life,

00:19:35.520 even if you're like my morality was my society's morality and then you point out, yeah, but that moral

00:19:40.980 system has changed constantly throughout history and now you look back at all those previous moral

00:19:46.660 systems as savagery and you should expect that people in the future, like we do not live in the

00:19:52.020 moral nexus of history right now. So you likely want to try to develop a system that is more

00:19:56.400 sophisticated than whatever system you happen to be born into. And this realization leads to

00:20:03.400 relativism. This I mark as a negative eight. So a very mental, very unsophisticated, close to

00:20:12.200 animalism in its level of lack of intellectual sophistication or like the people was in it,

00:20:18.060 like you just can't have very complicated discussions with them. This is the belief system

00:20:22.140 that attempts to see all moral frameworks and cosmologies as equally true. This world framework

00:20:27.360 often leads to nihilism and value paralyzation. This system leads to high amounts of nihilism and

00:20:34.200 uniquely poor mental health outcomes. So what do you have any thoughts on these past two systems?

00:20:38.940 I find it interesting and I like how basically becoming more advanced or having some kind of

00:20:47.920 fancy rule set behind what you're doing doesn't necessarily make you, we'll say morally or logically

00:20:56.460 superior to someone who has absolutely nothing on that front. So that's interesting. I've not really

00:21:02.640 seen a system like that where you can advance, but you can advance in a really bad direction.

00:21:07.380 I also will note here that spiral dynamics, people will be like, what stage you're at at

00:21:11.120 the spiral doesn't mark whether you are a good or a bad person often. And I do not take that

00:21:17.120 framework at all. I think that certain parts of the tree or the map almost always lead to negative

00:21:23.780 behavior patterns. However, the negative behavior patterns are negative as judged by other moral

00:21:28.320 frameworks. I don't really, when I'm marking a part of the tree, I am not marking it by the moral

00:21:34.340 action of its members. I am marking it by their ability to understand an intellectually sophisticated

00:21:40.600 conversation when you're having it with them. If you're discussing intellectually sophisticated

00:21:44.360 ideas, can they talk back to you or do they just go right over their head is one thing that is judged

00:21:50.500 on and mental health outcomes is the other thing it's judged on. Can they largely structure their lives

00:21:55.740 and if they choose to live mentally healthy, fulfilled lives and relativism, obviously I think

00:22:03.460 most intellectually sophisticated people can understand why very few people are actually at

00:22:06.700 the relativist stage because it's just so stupid. Like obviously you can't say all societies are equally

00:22:14.180 morally just. My favorite line from the relativist standpoint was, I forgot who it was, but it was a

00:22:19.500 British general and some of his Hindi soldiers who were fighting for him and began to construct

00:22:25.640 a fire to burn the widows of some other troop members on. And they were clearly not doing this

00:22:33.260 voluntarily. And there was a tradition for a widowed wife to be burned along with the remains of her

00:22:41.220 husband, correct? Yeah. And he said, you can't do this. And they're like, we're on the same side,

00:22:46.420 like respect our traditions, expect multi-traditionalism. And his response to this

00:22:52.440 was to say, Oh, okay. I understand. Sure. I'll respect your tradition, but you need to respect

00:22:58.980 ours. And so I will let you burn the widows. And then I will begin hanging your men because in England,

00:23:05.960 we hang people who burn women alive. And that was the end of the discussion. And what I mean by this

00:23:13.200 is if you adopt a true relativist framework, you can excuse any moral horror as it's just

00:23:20.300 their way. And people will be like, but Malcolm, you're so pluralistic. Isn't that what you're doing?

00:23:24.720 And I'm like, no, I still judge other cultural groups as morally wrong when they do things that

00:23:30.860 my culture disagrees with that I would see us abusing their kids and stuff like that. I just look

00:23:36.120 at the downstream consequences of a society where everyone can impose their moral frameworks on

00:23:40.920 everyone else and see that downstream consequence as a worse than morally internally judging other

00:23:48.320 groups, but saying, I won't interfere with them and they will eventually self-extinguish.

00:23:52.440 And this immoral action will leave the world. But that's where people leave that system. It's

00:23:56.840 people in this. They're not like me where they don't hold this perception from a functionalist

00:24:00.980 framework, i.e. Well, we can't just have everyone impose their moral values on everyone else.

00:24:05.380 Right. But I also believe that other groups are immoral when they don't follow my moral framework,

00:24:11.480 as we'll be more and more clear as we go further down the chart. Then that leads to the next mindset,

00:24:18.580 which is the default mindset that people porn into the developed world are born into.

00:24:23.080 And this I have at a true zero. So it's not a positive. It's not a negative mindset. It is

00:24:28.280 utilitarianism. This framework sees the goal of an individual life being to maximize the emotional

00:24:33.840 state in the general population, though individuals in this mindset often heavily overvalue their own

00:24:40.380 mental state in internal calculations. This is the starting mental state of most humans born into a

00:24:46.700 secular society and is the branching point the more derived philosophies come out of. So this is where

00:24:52.720 the tree starts branching. And I'm sure you have seen this mental state and you were probably born into

00:24:57.140 a utilitarian culture if you were born into any culture. It's a default assumed position in our

00:25:03.640 society today. And a lot of people are like, if it's the default position, why do we see some people go

00:25:09.100 back to religion? And so I think that there's two things happening here, like deontological religious

00:25:13.960 systems or perceptionalism, right? Most people who are in the deontological religious systems, either they

00:25:21.700 were raised in often rural, poorer areas that just were not as carried along by the march of civilization as

00:25:29.120 other areas and thus are mentally healthier as a result of that. Or they, instead of progressing

00:25:36.280 further on the tree, when they saw that the mindset of the culture they were raised in just wasn't

00:25:41.740 working, they retreated to the last stable state. And so they retreated to religion. Then you're like,

00:25:48.300 why are there so many perceptionalists in our society? Most perceptionalists are people who at some

00:25:53.820 point in their life succumbed to some form of animalism and then just barely escaped that

00:25:59.680 animalism. And that's why they're at the perceptionalist stage, but they were born and taught

00:26:04.680 within school and had all the resources to be in the utilitarianist mindset. They just maybe got

00:26:11.360 addicted to drugs or developed a deep self-hatred. Or as they often say, I experienced, like my mom said,

00:26:17.360 extreme scarcity as a child of something. And therefore I really can't get above stage one

00:26:22.980 scarcity mindset in terms of intellectual sophistication. So any thoughts?

00:26:28.500 That makes sense. And I guess I can understand why utilitarianism would be the default in your

00:26:34.240 system, because also if you live in a fairly nihilistic society, you're still going to end up

00:26:41.480 on average being empathetic because most humans are. Most humans don't like to see other people

00:26:46.740 suffering. So it's a pretty easy moral default to fall back on in the same way that humans and apes

00:26:53.480 instinctually fall back on fairness being moral, even though it is a nonsensical concept, right?

00:27:02.220 Yeah. Explain what you mean by fairness as a nonsensical concept.

00:27:05.880 So there we found that, oh, not that it's evolved, but yeah. So fairness is nonsensical because there's

00:27:12.420 literally no way you can make something fair on all dimensions. And there's this great example

00:27:16.920 that was presented in this book called Policy Paradox by Deborah Stone that was really

00:27:20.840 influential when I read it. It, to me, what she describes is a cake that you have to fairly divide

00:27:27.740 for a class. So how are you going to divide up this cake? Are you going to divide it by

00:27:32.560 who is the most hungry, by who is the best student, by who the teacher likes the most,

00:27:38.700 by who had the hardest childhood, by who is the most clever and the subject, by who wants it the

00:27:43.660 most? There's no way to make it fair along all of those dimensions because everyone has differing

00:27:48.940 levels of all of these different merits, meaning that there is no such thing as fair. But as we've

00:27:54.420 seen in Capuchin Monkeys with this famous video where you can see a Capuchin Monkey being given

00:27:59.400 some kind of remuneration, some kind of food-based remuneration for a task. And then it sees the

00:28:05.720 monkey next to it getting an even more delicious food for that same task. And suddenly, despite being

00:28:13.360 perfectly satisfied previously with their compensation, they become completely irate

00:28:18.700 because this is unfair. I'm getting grape and you will see what happens.

00:28:23.500 So she gives a rock to us. That's the task. And we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it.

00:28:29.180 The other one needs to give a rock to us. And that's what she does. And she gets a grape.

00:28:38.120 And she eats it. The other one sees that. She gives a rock to us now. Gets again cucumber.

00:28:42.640 She tests the rock now against the wall. She needs to give it to us. And she gets cucumber again.

00:28:54.960 She tests the rock now against the wall. She needs to give it to us. And she gets cucumber again.

00:29:08.900 So it seems pretty clear from that experiment, another research done, that our instinct for

00:29:23.060 fairness evolved as us being a collaborative mammal.

00:29:28.180 To put it in another word, it is part of our pre-evolved instincts. No different from lust or

00:29:34.480 something like that. It is not. More empathy. Because it's a group-based society where we have

00:29:39.880 to collaborate and we have to all contribute. Those groups that felt instincts around fairness

00:29:45.960 or empathy typically outperformed groups that did not feel things like that. Because typically,

00:29:51.860 if you feel something like empathy, if you feel something like fairness, you're not going to have

00:29:55.440 as many free riders. You're going to have more people contributing of their own free will

00:29:59.960 and enforcing contribution as well. Selfish gene would argue you're wrong on this.

00:30:05.220 Really?

00:30:05.480 Yeah. Group level evolution is not an in favor idea within the field of evolution right now.

00:30:11.920 I don't want to get too far into that. But the point being is using a claim to fairness to ask

00:30:19.180 for things or anger at society when you see unfairness is a pre-evolved trait.

00:30:24.040 Selfishly, yeah.

00:30:24.960 And it is an animalistic trait. It is a trait that is monkey-like. It is not a... If we define

00:30:31.520 your level of humanity being your distance, like the things that you chose about yourself instead

00:30:36.400 of the things that were just pre-evolved into you, it is one of these lower order emotional subsets.

00:30:41.720 Yeah. So it's above a desire for sex or those more basic things.

00:30:45.960 No, I don't think it is above those things.

00:30:48.100 But you mark this as a neutral zero.

00:30:50.320 I said utilitarianism. Utilitarianism isn't a desire for fairness.

00:30:53.720 I think utilitarianism comes from a place of empathy. You don't think so?

00:30:57.600 We'll talk about where it comes from in a second. The desire for fairness falls into animalism

00:31:01.960 when people are just like, I need fairness at this animalistic level. The people will elevate

00:31:07.980 some pre-evolved traits as being higher order than other pre-evolved traits because they see

00:31:14.560 them as being more conducive to motivating pro-social behavior within a functioning society.

00:31:23.060 But I don't see them that way. I see pro-social behavior motivated by logic as being higher

00:31:27.880 order than pro-social behavior motivated by animalistic instincts. And so I don't think

00:31:32.620 it's helpful. And you'll understand why I would see it this way when you get to the higher order

00:31:36.720 parts of the tree. I don't think that there is any utility in ordering your pre-evolved emotions.

00:31:42.460 Now, I will note that a lot of utilitarians, right, they do not like self-identify as a

00:31:49.140 utilitarian. A lot of them are arguing for hypotheses about how to best create a utilitarian

00:31:56.500 landscape. So by that, what I mean is a libertarian and a communist, where that is like the core of

00:32:03.580 their moral framing, can both be different types of utilitarians, where they have two different

00:32:09.540 hypotheses about how best to distribute positive emotional states within a population. It can have

00:32:16.660 many different faces. But most of them are represented within mainstream political positions

00:32:23.380 because it is the mainstream belief system within our culture today. When conservatives and progressives

00:32:28.080 are arguing, they are often arguing with the presumption that the goal is utilitarianism. Help the

00:32:35.140 most people on average in the country with the laws that they're implementing. Before we go into the

00:32:39.860 branches of the tree, I should explain why the tree itself branches. It is because individuals choose to

00:32:46.580 optimize around different things, and therefore go in different directions. So individuals on the urban

00:32:55.300 monoculture path, we call it, are attempting to optimize around their own subjective experience of

00:33:01.700 reality, like how good that experience is. The mystical path is completely dedicated to the expansion of

00:33:10.340 your experience of reality. And then the pragmatist path is completely dedicated to impacting the objective

00:33:17.620 world around you and determining what has value in that world. So now we're to the first branch of the tree,

00:33:25.860 the urban monoculture branch. This is the mainstream, like when you're moving into elitist circles within

00:33:33.300 the urban monoculture, like intellectually elitist circles, you're typically traveling down this branch.

00:33:38.500 And if you are born into an intellectually elite circle within the urban monoculture, and you want to

00:33:43.780 develop into one of the like better branches of the trees, you often need to first recess your mental

00:33:48.740 thinking back to utilitarianism before you can move forwards again. So this pathway is aimed at reducing

00:33:55.540 the personal experience of negative emotional states and negative self-judgment. A path towards it is

00:34:02.420 often driven by nihilism around finding that you can't actually have a meaningful impact on world

00:34:09.860 events in the way you would want to as an individual, and thus it is heavily colored by an external locus

00:34:15.940 of control. So the first note on this branch is negative five, self-acceptance. These individuals try to

00:34:23.620 accept themselves for who they have allowed themselves to become. The goal within this system is a lack of

00:34:29.780 negative self-judgment. Obviously to someone outside of this mental state, they would say that you should

00:34:35.700 try to be the type of person worthy of love and not love yourself if you are indeed wretched. However, to

00:34:43.860 people who go down this path, they often have the prior that they cannot really change who they are.

00:34:49.460 And then to move to the next node within this particular tree, that happens when people decide

00:34:55.460 to be a quote-unquote good person and build a pathological need to see themselves as a good

00:35:01.780 person. Thus, even though you can't help everyone, these individuals decide to help as many people as

00:35:07.460 they can within the moral framework of this self-acceptance, never experience anything negative

00:35:13.460 in their lives, blah, blah, blah. We've talked a lot about this when talking about the urban monoculture.

00:35:17.620 Then they get to a negative six node, so slightly lower. In the moment, negative utilitarianism,

00:35:24.980 responsibility avoidance. This is the life philosophy held by many of the most educated

00:35:30.420 elites within the urban monoculture. We talk about it all the time in other areas, so I won't go into

00:35:36.420 it too much here. Suffice to say, it is a system of morals based around attempting to set up a world

00:35:42.420 structure where people can do whatever they want, whenever they want, without ever encountering

00:35:47.380 emotional discomfort, with no care towards the long-term consequences. Individuals in this state

00:35:53.140 often do not have sophisticated models of reality, and instead focus more on the aesthetic of benign

00:35:59.460 quote-unquote good with a very narrow moral framework, or within a very narrow moral framework,

00:36:05.700 with the epitome of somebody in this moral system being the Hays movement, for example. Even though

00:36:12.020 this causes long-term damage to people, occluding from them that being fat is unhealthy, it reduces

00:36:17.140 in the moment suffering. You can see things like affirmative action being the result of this,

00:36:20.820 or handing out fentanyl being the result of this. But this is where, if you are born into the elite

00:36:25.060 of the urban monoculture, often a wealthy, really college-educated family, this is going to be the

00:36:30.580 mindset that you are grown up being indoctrinated with. But you can also see that this is a branch

00:36:37.540 that's not coming out of the negative utilitarian branch, it's just a completely different branch,

00:36:41.940 which is very interesting, and it's also worse mentally than the general utilitarian. When you

00:36:47.860 meet these people, you're often able to have less sophisticated conversations with them than you can

00:36:52.100 a general utilitarian, even though their philosophical beliefs are downstream of general utilitarianism.

00:36:58.500 Yeah, I've noticed that normally the conversations just go along the lines of,

00:37:05.060 you just can't do that, or that's just wrong, instead of negative utilitarians or utilitarians

00:37:11.380 in general having a bit more to say about why something could be damaging or is suboptimal,

00:37:18.900 which is interesting. So to get to the final node at the end of the urban monoculture branch,

00:37:24.260 you realize that you're going to die and you begin to form an obsessive fear around this negative eight

00:37:31.620 mental state, which I call life extensionism. And this is the mental state, it's actually a realization

00:37:37.380 I had while I was going through this chart of just you fear negative emotions, right? But you realize

00:37:44.180 that not existing is the worst negative emotional state from your own perspective, really different

00:37:49.380 from the effilis and stuff like that. And so you begin to build your entire life around a fear of

00:37:55.700 death and not existing anymore. And you just can't let go of this. And this is why you often see this

00:38:01.140 within the ultra educated elite in our society. As to why this particular pathway ends in life

00:38:07.380 extensionism and a paralyzing fear of death, it is because the core thing that drives people to this

00:38:14.740 pathway versus the other two pathways is an elevation of an individual's own personal subjective

00:38:21.060 experience of reality, which of course leads to the fetidization of your own objective experience

00:38:26.100 of reality. And then of course, if it is your own objective experience of reality that is the thing

00:38:32.100 of value in reality, then a reality that no longer has that thing is a reality without any value,

00:38:37.780 which is what causes this obsession with life extension and fear of death for people on this

00:38:45.220 pathway. Yeah. Now we're to branch three mysticism. This happens when an individual begins to focus

00:38:52.820 on finding some metric to expand one's internal mental state to something above just quote unquote

00:38:59.060 mentally healthy. And this branch of the tree is the one that a lot of other level systems treat as

00:39:05.060 the only branch of the tree. Like after utilitarianism, they're like the mystical path is the right

00:39:09.780 path. So node one within the mystic branch is a negative three node. So actually fairly mentally

00:39:14.980 healthy, which we call low mysticism or low mystic. Low mystics look for an expanded internal experience

00:39:23.620 of the world, which they believe can be achieved through improving their internal self. However,

00:39:28.260 there is no higher order inner self outside of that can be achieved by simple self-discipline and what

00:39:34.260 can be learned through the study of science. As such, they construct a self-masturbatory framework and

00:39:39.380 hierarchy. This is the branch most individuals who create level systems like spiral dynamics are at.

00:39:45.700 Basically, they believe in mental states that are deeper or higher order than just having mental self

00:39:53.940 control. And because of that, they create almost a theological belief in higher order mental states that

00:40:00.100 they then attempt to access when they are in this setting of low mystic. Do you have any thoughts?

00:40:06.980 No.

00:40:08.660 Then the next, they move from low mystic to high mystic when the low mystic framework leads to the belief

00:40:14.980 that the world we interact with is an illusion and that higher order information can be gained from

00:40:20.820 alternative mental states. Essentially, this is the path that quote unquote shatters the illusion of

00:40:26.340 knowing. Negative nine high mystic. They are at the same philosophical sophistication of people in the

00:40:32.020 true state of animalism. Oh no.

00:40:34.340 High mystics start to draw an understanding of the world from corrupted mental states achieved with

00:40:39.380 things like hallucinogens, chants, or rituals. They stop being people you can engage with through logical

00:40:45.220 structure as their experience of reality trumps all others. They usually become arrogant and condescending

00:40:51.860 with the belief that they have access sources of knowledge that no one can touch. However,

00:40:56.420 because their sources of knowledge are generally not cross-interpretable, e.g. their own experience

00:41:02.980 always trumps all others, there isn't a way for them to have productive conversation with even others of

00:41:09.380 their group. And so an example of this, I was talking with someone who had begun to travel down the

00:41:14.100 pathway of the high mystic and he was like, yeah, like I try to be logical in how I'm trying to access

00:41:20.020 these higher order mental states. I can't meet other people or have conversations with other

00:41:24.500 people trying to be logical about it because for all of us the truths that have been revealed through

00:41:30.500 what I would call a corrupted mental state trump all other truths that have been revealed through

00:41:35.380 other people because you haven't experienced those corrupted mental states and therefore there is no

00:41:39.940 interpretability between the frameworks developed within these various frameworks which leads to

00:41:47.060 intellectual isolation once you enter this stage. Any thoughts here? I'm sure you've met people who

00:41:53.140 are in the stage of high mysticism and they're just really hard to engage with.

00:41:57.540 Yeah, when you throw most rules and pieces of evidence out the window and have to question everything,

00:42:05.700 it's hard to have any sort of meaningful conversation.

00:42:08.260 When your own subjective experience of reality trumps any measurable objective experience of

00:42:14.820 reality, then there's no longer any interinterpretability between you and other

00:42:21.780 intellectuals, no matter how smart you are. And this is why we're so against the mystic pathway, but I think

00:42:26.420 this better shows why we're against the mystic pathway. Then the final stage in the mystic pathway

00:42:31.460 comes from living in the self-imposed intellectual isolation. Basically you're living like in a

00:42:38.740 self-imposed jail cell where you can't talk to anyone for decades, and it causes a phenomenon we call

00:42:44.420 brain rot. This is the only negative 10 on the entire tree. Individuals with brain rot are only

00:42:52.740 able to communicate in simple narrative loops. It is quite common among boobers who went down the mystic

00:42:58.980 path. When you talk to these individuals, they will either respond with a simple narrative loop

00:43:03.540 about something like what they did that day, some event that happened in the past, or their medical

00:43:08.820 history. While people in the animalism state have an uncontrolled or untamed soul, individuals with

00:43:16.180 brain rot almost feel like they have no soul left. And this is something that you can often see and is

00:43:24.580 apparent from their eyes and facial expressions. If I was going to put on my theological cap here,

00:43:31.620 I would say this is the end result of communing with chaos and inviting demons into their hearts,

00:43:37.460 which feasted on their soul. If I am going to put on my secular hat, I would say that this is just the

00:43:42.740 result of living so long with an unstructured logical system that their higher order brain function

00:43:48.420 simply stopped working. Basically it atrophied. Their brains basically atrophied to a state where they can

00:43:53.060 only talk in narrative self loops. And if people don't understand what I mean by narrative self

00:43:56.580 loops, if you talk to boomers who grew up in the hippie movement, they're often in a state of brain

00:44:00.660 rot where you will try to engage them with an intellectual conversation and then they'll just

00:44:05.380 repeat almost like it didn't hit them at all with a narrative loop about what they did that day or like

00:44:10.580 a narrative loop about something that happened to them in the past or a narrative loop about their

00:44:14.420 medical history. These are the common narrative loops you'll have, but they seem to like it literally goes

00:44:19.460 in one ear and out the other. People in other states, if you try to engage them with a level

00:44:25.940 of intellectual sophistication that they are incapable of engaging with, they typically either respond

00:44:32.100 with anger or just saying what you're talking about doesn't exist. People like this just can't

00:44:39.140 engage with you. They almost are like zombies walking through life. And you've seen this before.

00:44:43.380 You've seen brain rot before. It's something we've talked a lot about.

00:44:45.700 Most people have. Yeah. Often in older parents or neighbors or something along those lines,

00:44:53.140 people who are just completely lost in their own lives, but not even meaningful lives. Just the

00:44:59.860 minutia of making meals or getting up to shower or paying bills.

00:45:04.900 Yeah. It's a really sad state to see. And I think it is the end state of the mystic path,

00:45:11.220 which is why we're so afraid of the mystic path. I think you can end as a low mystic and still be a

00:45:17.140 very intelligent person. That's easy for me to converse with. The problem, I meet very few old

00:45:22.420 low mystics. Most mystics, like when you start engaging with low mysticism, you almost inevitably

00:45:28.580 come to the conclusion that this shattering of the illusion of knowing, which then puts you on the

00:45:33.540 path to high mysticism, which puts you on the path to total brain rot. People with a uniquely high

00:45:38.260 amount of mental fortitude can stay on low mysticism, but a lot of them are pulled forwards

00:45:44.180 inexorably into high mysticism and then these more dangerous mental states. And this becomes really

00:45:48.980 dangerous when entire religious communities move into states of low mysticism or high mysticism,

00:45:54.340 because people get pulled really quickly to unefficaciousness. Because you can justify

00:45:59.060 anything as a good life when you're on the mystic tradition, which means you typically don't

00:46:03.140 contribute back much to society. Fair.

00:46:06.580 Now we're on the final branch, the quote unquote good branch, or the branch that we have gone down

00:46:12.580 and I think leads to the most positive mental outcomes, which I call pragmatism. So people go

00:46:18.820 from utilitarianism to pragmatism when they realize the value of attempting to live for a value system is

00:46:26.500 good. But the value system of like, there is value in saying, okay, this is what good is. And I will

00:46:33.300 structure my life around this in my moral framework around this, but value systems based around the

00:46:38.820 subjective emotional states of humans are stupid. So by that, what I mean, and this is a statement we

00:46:43.860 often throw out quite frequently is value systems. Like you say, I am living my life to optimize human

00:46:49.460 happiness. What is human happiness or like positive human emotional states? Those are just the things that

00:46:54.020 our ancestors felt in response to environmental conditions that led to them having more surviving

00:47:00.100 offspring than their neighbors. It would be like a group of paperclip maximizers deciding that the

00:47:04.980 number of paperclips in the world is a true moral good. It's just what we're programmed to believe.

00:47:09.780 But unlike paperclip maximizers, we were programmed by serendipity. So it's like a lower order philosophy

00:47:14.820 than even if paperclip maximizers came to this. And the few groups of paperclip maximizers that are like,

00:47:20.020 oh, I actually believe that there should be a higher order way to structure one's logic.

00:47:24.340 They might actually follow the same branches that I've described here. One might focus on,

00:47:28.740 I might be able to program myself to have some deeper understanding of the true nature of reality.

00:47:34.260 And then they would go down the mystic path. And then another might go down this path,

00:47:37.380 which is to say there are things of value. It's just, this is a bad way to structure it.

00:47:41.140 Plus seven, low pragmatism. People with this value system decide on an objective function

00:47:46.900 or set of things they believe have intrinsic value and then construct their identities and lives to

00:47:52.020 maximize those things. The book, the pragmatist guide to life is a guide towards constructing

00:47:56.660 one's life around this path. And what I should say when I'm talking about an objective function

00:48:02.260 is essentially you create a weighted list of things you think have value in the world.

00:48:07.220 So it could be a utilitarian framework, but it's likely not because this is typically what moves

00:48:11.060 you to true pragmatism is moving away from utilitarianism. And this weighted almost mathematical

00:48:16.180 equation determines how you judge individual decisions, but also how you judge how you construct

00:48:21.940 yourself. Instead of using a set of rules to decide what is moral, this path decides what is moral by the

00:48:29.860 effects of the actions on the world, adapting a consequentialist moral system instead of a

00:48:36.100 deontological one. So remember where I said you have the deontological religious framework,

00:48:40.740 this is a consequentialist framework where instead of following a set of rules, the rules that you choose

00:48:45.780 to live by are based on the consequences your actions have on reality. And for people who are

00:48:51.700 like, no, deontological ethics is a good way to do ethics. I'm like, okay, so like lying is bad.

00:48:56.420 You agree lying is bad. Yeah. Lying is bad. Or stealing is bad. Somebody said, I'll kill this

00:49:00.580 innocent child. If you don't lie, you're going to be like, okay, I can lie in that instance,

00:49:05.540 or I'm going to kill this innocent child. If you don't steal, you're like, okay, I'm going to kill.

00:49:08.660 So you've admitted immediately that yes, it is downstream or this genocide is going to happen.

00:49:13.460 If you don't lie, of course you then lie, right? I think everyone, they would really think about

00:49:18.500 it as okay. Obviously the deontological ethics is stupid. I just chose it because I think it's the

00:49:24.020 system that works at a societal level. And I disagree with some ethical systems that consequentialists

00:49:28.820 use or that consequentialist ethical systems can be used if chosen incorrectly to justify atrocities.

00:49:35.300 And it's yeah, if they're choosing bad things to optimize around it, can you be used to justify

00:49:40.260 atrocities? This is a particularly bad argument because deontological systems that are bad

00:49:46.260 can also lead to atrocities. Nothing about deontological ethical systems prevents them from

00:49:51.620 leading to atrocities. And then somebody will say, ah, yes, but my deontological ethical system would

00:49:57.380 never lead to atrocities. And then say like, yes, but my consequentialist ethical system would never lead

00:50:02.900 to atrocities. So at least from the perspective of the system itself. So it's not an argument.

00:50:09.700 Many religious individuals fall into this path, but unlike the deontological religious people,

00:50:15.220 they are more concerned with why God made rules and what he ultimately wants of them than the rules

00:50:22.100 themselves. For example, instead of just banning themselves from interacting with porn,

00:50:27.220 they ask, why is there a prohibition on porn? What behavior is that meant to encourage? Then

00:50:32.740 maximizing that directly. Simone, when I was talking to you about this offline,

00:50:36.900 you said it's the difference between dancing and DDR. Yeah. With DDR, you're clearly following

00:50:43.780 the rules. You're doing exactly the steps and you are technically dancing. But when you see someone

00:50:50.660 totally nailing DDR, it's very impressive and super cool, but they're not dancing. Whereas when

00:50:59.060 someone's dancing to the music, it is very clear that they are feeling the music and they are living

00:51:04.020 the music. And that is the easiest way for me to understand the difference between these things.

00:51:10.340 Yeah. And I think also when people think about this, I might even change, like was I going to say,

00:51:15.300 this is not a prescription towards a specific value system, right? We're not saying this is good or

00:51:20.500 that is good. It's just, these are people who have decided what they think is good in the world,

00:51:25.860 whether it's through a religious system or through just logicking it out. And then they construct

00:51:31.620 their identities in an attempt to maximize that thing. And they choose their actions and life choices

00:51:38.580 to maximize what they have either logically or theologically decided is good.

00:51:44.100 You're assigning points values to these things.

00:51:46.740 No, but what I'm saying is there's many moral frameworks that can fall within this system.

00:51:50.820 This is not saying this one religious system is true, or this one objective function is true.

00:51:56.660 It's just saying structuring your life in this way typically leads to better mental health outcomes

00:52:00.660 and better cross-interpretability.

00:52:02.180 So that's what the point system is for? It's for mental health outcomes?

00:52:05.860 Yeah, as I said, it's for mental health and philosophical sophistication,

00:52:08.980 which is really cross-interpretability. When I talk to these people, even if they're in a completely

00:52:13.940 different religious system than me, or they have a completely different moral framework than me,

00:52:17.700 I can usually have a fairly sophisticated philosophical conversation because they

00:52:22.340 understand as I do that they have a different objective function and they're able to use that

00:52:27.220 and engage with the core reasons that we have intellectual differences. And they're able to

00:52:32.900 recognize those reasons instead of just, I can't talk to you. You know what I mean?

00:52:36.340 Like with other things that you're just totally wrong about all of these assumptions about reality.

00:52:41.540 So there's no cross-interpretability between communication here, right? If you're talking

00:52:45.620 to somebody who thinks money has intrinsic values, I can't even begin to explain to you while you're

00:52:50.100 wrong. You're at such a low level of intellectual sophistication. Or if somebody is drawing truth

00:52:55.140 from emotional states rather than things that are cross-interpretable across people, I'm just not

00:52:59.780 going to be able to have a philosophical conversation with you, right? Post-apurton level of sophistication.

00:53:04.420 And so what I'm saying here is this is not saying you have to be like us. It's saying that there's

00:53:09.060 this one way of structuring things that leads to higher outcomes. Then the next node, an individual

00:53:16.660 goes from there to high pragmatism when an individual realizes the utility of religious systems,

00:53:22.980 how they evolved, and are acutely aware of memetic clusters and how they influence group behavior

00:53:30.820 and how they spread. So this is a plus nine, high pragmatism. While low pragmatism is focused on

00:53:38.100 self-mastery and living the best life possible as an individual, when people reach the state of high

00:53:43.620 pragmatism, they begin to focus more on how society came to be structured as it is, see the memetic

00:53:49.140 clusters move and interact and are acutely aware of the memetic clusters that influence themselves.

00:53:56.100 Think of this as quote-unquote seeing the matrix and then take that ability to begin to alter the

00:54:03.300 memetic systems that influence themselves to allow self-control to take less mental resources and

00:54:09.220 discipline. They also focus on influencing society more by creating memetic machines or influencing the

00:54:15.860 direction of memetic machines. Everyone in this stage lives by some sort of theological system but

00:54:23.540 are acutely aware of why the system is structured as it is to the most nuanced level while also

00:54:30.580 altering the course of society more by throwing stones into a river to change its flow than by

00:54:36.740 directly attempting to dam the river. The pragmatist's guide to crafting religion is designed to help

00:54:41.940 individuals at this stage. So does this make sense to you, the high pragmatism stage? It's a realization

00:54:49.940 that we had between the pragmatist's guide to life and the pragmatist's guide to crafting religion. When

00:54:54.340 the pragmatist's guide to life, we even point out 95% of the time you're not lucid. So you're operating

00:55:00.340 off of this internal narrative you've created about the type of person you are. The core advancement

00:55:05.620 between low pragmatism and high pragmatism is you learn about and accept that the older religions had

00:55:12.580 a lot of sophisticated tools that you can borrow scaffolding from and use that to better structure

00:55:20.260 yourself on autopilot so it requires less mental effort and you more adhere towards the life path

00:55:25.860 that you want for yourself in moments of lucidity. And for religious people, it comes when they realize,

00:55:32.100 oh, this is why my religion is structured the way it is. This is why God structured things like this,

00:55:38.260 or the course of history structured things like this, and I can utilize these systems for the

00:55:44.020 service of my community and for the service of God. It is seeing the matrix basically of this sort of

00:55:50.580 the memetic clouds blowing across our landscape and becoming the architect of them both within yourself

00:55:57.060 and within the outside world. But it's not with being just in our framework. It's basically everyone,

00:56:02.660 like when we talk about the index, everyone within the index is basically in a state of high pragmatism

00:56:06.420 because they are all working intentionally to build a culture for their family.

00:56:10.100 And what I like about this is that it seems to be pervaded by

00:56:13.860 bounded rationality in that we understand the limitations of our sentience and we try to

00:56:22.100 address that. Whereas in contrast with spirituality, for example, there's this

00:56:30.980 adherence or chasing after this illusion that you can be fully awake and enlightened. Whereas the

00:56:40.420 pragmatist, especially the high pragmatist understands that there is no such thing as being fully awake or

00:56:45.780 enlightened. And we have to optimize our limited systems around our limitations, right?

00:56:53.140 Yeah. And another thing about high pragmatism is individuals within the high pragmatist state

00:56:57.620 often have a very low attachment to themselves. By this, what I mean is they see themselves

00:57:04.340 typically as like frames within time affected by memetic clouds. And they are part of those memetic

00:57:11.300 clouds and how those clouds move through time. And their biological bodies are not particularly

00:57:18.100 important to them. This is how the high pragmatist path really differentiates from the life extensionist

00:57:25.060 path, like the fear of death path. Typically, whatever religious framework you're dealing with or anything

00:57:30.020 like that, you are just part of a tradition and you don't see yourself as being in a particularly

00:57:35.220 privileged position, even from your own perspective. And I'd say a unique thing about high pragmatist is

00:57:42.180 they typically do not really fear death. They just fear the things that they won't have time to do

00:57:47.620 because that's what they see their life as. Every day is just, I need to do this and this

00:57:52.180 to live my life towards putting society on the best course possible. And then the final stage within

00:57:59.060 this, an individual achieves perfect self mastery is plus 10 freedom from sin. Humans are not yet capable

00:58:07.220 of entering this stage. To believe you can is to commit a sin of arrogance. However, with technology

00:58:12.580 and further gene editing or further intellectual sophistication that might be achieved by my descendants,

00:58:17.700 this state might be achievable. And so that is how the tree works. Does that seem, like when you think

00:58:23.140 about this tree, does it seem more useful to you than the tree presented by spiral dynamics?

00:58:33.060 Both of them seem equally useless to me, if we're being honest. I just don't see the point.

00:58:37.220 Okay, why don't you see the point? This is very interesting to me.

00:58:41.220 People are going to choose the philosophy they choose. They're not going to be influenced by this.

00:58:44.820 I care about the so what of this. So how is it going to change behavior, my behavior, someone else's

00:58:50.100 behavior? How is this going to help me behave in a way that is advantageous?

00:58:54.500 I actually disagree really strongly with your perspective here.

00:58:57.060 Well, of course, because you made this framework. So you must think there's some utility in it.

00:59:00.740 I will explain why I think you're wrong about this.

00:59:03.220 Okay.

00:59:03.700 One, I think this framework, when you look at it, is also an obviously true framework.

00:59:07.780 Unlike spiral dynamics, which I really think you get after a point, there is a level, like you might

00:59:12.580 disagree with my scoring system, but I think a lot of people would at least agree with the map

00:59:17.780 more broadly. And that my scoring system may be more downstream of how these different

00:59:23.300 philosophical perspectives or world perspectives are able to relate to somebody within the high

00:59:27.620 pragmatist perspective. Obviously, somebody within the high pragmatist perspective is going to have

00:59:31.540 more inter-interpretability with somebody else in the high pragmatist perspective.

00:59:34.740 But even if you say that, I think broadly, they can agree that the map is true. And when they see the map,

00:59:40.900 it allows them to either quickly advance to higher frameworks or see the dangers that are involved

00:59:48.980 with the part of the tree that they're on. So I think when you see something like a low mystic that

00:59:54.020 might be beginning to proceed towards high mystic, and I'm like, look, this is the path you're on.

00:59:58.820 I'm sure you can think of people within your life. Like, instead of me being like, oh,

01:00:01.860 here, Trump is on the chart. That's what everyone always does. I don't need to do that.

01:00:04.820 Like, you can think of people within your own life who have descended into brain rot or within high

01:00:09.780 mysticism. And low mystics typically look down on people in a state of brain rot or even people

01:00:16.740 in advanced states of high mysticism. But because they don't really see it as an inexorable path of

01:00:23.060 their philosophy, they don't realize the danger of the path they're on. And I think that's where the

01:00:29.220 utility of the tree is. I also think the utility of the tree is very useful to people who are at these

01:00:34.100 very low parts of the tree, like perceptionalism. People at a perceptionalist state may not believe

01:00:39.460 that there's anything above them. But as soon as you start delineating all these philosophical

01:00:43.540 frameworks above them, I think most of them have to begrudgingly be like, okay, there are more

01:00:47.540 sophisticated mental states than the one I'm at right now. I think it also helps people understand,

01:00:53.220 because I think that there can be a belief among people at the deontological part of the tree,

01:00:57.380 the deontological religious part of the tree, that there is no religious pathway further

01:01:02.580 than the deontological stage that they're at. Because they're at this incredibly high local

01:01:07.220 optimum where they need to path through the valley of utilitarianism before they then get to the higher

01:01:14.020 religious or theological pathway again. And so I think that's another thing, right? That they don't

01:01:19.540 realize, oh, there is a higher order pathway and here it is mapped out how to get there.

01:01:26.020 Does that sound useful to you now?

01:01:27.860 I appreciate that this can show how a radicalized version of a behavior could become. Like if

01:01:34.500 someone's just getting started with dabbling in drugs, putting them in some kind of scared

01:01:39.620 straight program and being like, this is what happens if you keep doing what you're doing.

01:01:43.780 So I see what you're saying. And I also like any sort of framework that shows people a world beyond

01:01:48.980 their own. One thing that I really love about the Collins Institute and the work you're doing on it,

01:01:52.580 the school that we're creating is that it features this skill tree that shows tons of domains of

01:01:58.820 information that I didn't even know I didn't even know. So I like that as well. But yeah,

01:02:05.220 I don't know. I have the same general reaction to this that I do to spiral dynamics. And perhaps this

01:02:09.860 is due to my inherent lack of intellectual curiosity where I'm just like, okay. But I also think that

01:02:16.660 people in these other categories aren't going to engage with it in the way that you think they would.

01:02:20.820 Like you think they'd be like, oh, I see how I could progress here. But I think a deontological

01:02:26.340 inherent, like someone in that category is you would categorize them would be like,

01:02:31.140 no, this is how I get closest to God. This is the correct way. And I'm following these rules.

01:02:35.460 So they wouldn't even put themselves in that category. So seeing themselves there wouldn't

01:02:39.620 do anything because they wouldn't believe that they are there in the first place. You know what I mean?

01:02:43.620 Here's another area where I think it has really high utility as I think that there's a belief that progress

01:02:48.660 is always, especially if you're going down the urban monoculture pathway towards like self-acceptance,

01:02:53.620 like you really see this, like they're like, okay, after self-actualization, that comes through

01:02:57.380 self-acceptance. And then it goes, and I'm like, no, the end of self-acceptance is no longer questioning

01:03:03.620 yourself. And then that always ends with a paralyzing fear of death. That always ends with you trying to

01:03:09.540 in a paralyzing feeling of any in the moment, emotional inconvenience, right? Of the belief that

01:03:15.140 everyone should be affirmed for believing whoever they are, you know, obviously if all society is

01:03:19.700 doing, this is going to lead to enormous mental health problems and stuff like that. It's just a

01:03:22.980 very bad way to structure society. And that you cannot like, you need to reverse track to an earlier

01:03:32.180 mental state before you can branch into the more sophisticated and mentally healthy segments of the

01:03:38.340 tree. And I have seen a lot of people dead end in various branches. For example, I know a lot of low

01:03:46.020 mystics who have dead end at the low mystic branch. They have the intelligence to go higher, but they

01:03:51.060 were just seduced into that path early on. And they don't realize they need to go back before going

01:03:56.100 forwards. It's the same with people who enter this state of intense paralyzation in terms of the fear of

01:04:01.780 dying. And they begin to just spend all their money to stop dying and everything like that. And it's like,

01:04:06.180 how did you get here? And when they can see the larger map that this is not actually a fear that

01:04:11.300 they need to have when they have different self-conceptualizations of themselves, but they

01:04:15.860 need to go a number of stages back before they're at a level of optimization again. And I also think

01:04:21.780 that the chart shows, which is really useful to people is going forwards in terms of mental systems,

01:04:27.460 like realizing obvious logical inconsistencies or problems with a philosophical or world framework

01:04:33.780 doesn't move you to necessarily a more sophisticated moral framework. And I also think it's really

01:04:39.460 important to have a map for what happens after self-actualization. And I view self-actualization

01:04:45.140 as a stage as occurring almost before, like at self-acceptance, I guess you could say,

01:04:50.020 like it is the wrong pathway. Once you've gone to self-actualization, you've gone the wrong way.

01:04:54.580 What I like about that too, is like Ayla went through this process where she tried to interview as

01:04:59.140 many people as she could who had believed to achieve some form of enlightenment and then found

01:05:03.780 that there was no uniform definition of enlightenment. And it does show that this is a field

01:05:10.420 when it comes to human flourishing that is perhaps a little bit anemic. We haven't really thought

01:05:15.220 through what human flourishing is, what enlightenment is, what it is to be self-actualized to reach one's

01:05:20.740 full potential. So I like that at least.

01:05:22.500 The reason for that is so few people are on these higher branches of the tree that they just haven't

01:05:28.580 thought about it or that they can't see it. I think that some branches of the tree can't see

01:05:34.340 other branches of the tree. I think a lot of people who are deep in the mystic path genuinely cannot

01:05:41.220 see the other branches of the tree. They just disappear to them and look like just an earlier stage.

01:05:47.220 I think sometimes, and this I think is true for the Ethelist, right? They can no longer see the

01:05:52.420 other branches of the tree once they're there. Just everything appears perplexing to them. They

01:05:57.060 don't understand how somebody went from here to here. And I think the full map allows a degree of

01:06:04.580 cross-interpretability between the different branches. If somebody is at this stage of,

01:06:09.780 we need to just remove negative human emotions, they don't understand how somebody could have gotten to

01:06:15.620 like low or high pragmatism where they're like, yeah, but it causes in the moment emotional pain,

01:06:21.060 causing in the moment emotional pain makes me a bad guy. Why would I care about any other sort of

01:06:25.460 ethical framework? I'm like, but long-term, even by your own system, you're causing huge amounts of

01:06:30.580 suffering. And they're like, I'm not directly causing that. That's more of a consequence of the

01:06:33.620 system I'm creating. And so then you have to put into a, okay, there's thought experiments. If you're

01:06:38.100 putting into place a system now that is going to explode on someone in a hundred years who isn't even born

01:06:42.980 yet in a bed that we shot, are you responsible for that? And then it's, yeah, of course I'm

01:06:46.660 responsible for that. But it's like, how is that any different if you're creating a cultural system

01:06:50.020 that's doing that to millions of people? It allows for an explanation or better explanation as to why

01:06:58.580 these other moral systems aren't as useful and lead to, I think, actions that are just wrong,

01:07:06.500 which you often notice about the other branches of the tree is they get worse as they get deeper.

01:07:13.540 So for most branches of the tree, you're actually better off not advancing to the higher stages.

01:07:18.980 And it's always just-

01:07:19.700 Would you say that the, if we were to plush this out more, and I guess this is a tree that's only

01:07:23.940 giving examples, it's not comprehensive, that we'll say rationalism as it existed a while ago could

01:07:30.420 be seen as the extreme going too far with pragmatism where people are like, I'm just going to be so

01:07:36.340 practical that I'm going to eat a stick of butter every day because the research says so, that kind of thing?

01:07:41.540 Yeah. With rationalism, I would see it as extremely, I'd actually say it's the branch between

01:07:48.340 utilitarianism and low pragmatism, but I wouldn't say it's all the way to low pragmatism yet.

01:07:53.700 What would be pragmatism taken too far?

01:07:55.540 I don't think you can. Everything else can become corrupted except for our chosen philosophy.

01:08:04.100 Yes. That's why I like our philosophy. That's why I warn against other philosophies. And you can

01:08:09.540 follow one of the mystic traditions and go, when I mean like theological traditions, and then become

01:08:14.900 a high pragmatist and try to structure it to be of usefulness to you, right? And I think this shows how

01:08:19.300 people who are in the mystic traditions can try to restructure them from a high pragmatist framework,

01:08:23.140 but they just can never succumb to the belief that the information they receive from corrupted

01:08:28.340 states of mind is higher order than sort of their objective experience of reality. And I think that

01:08:34.740 that's the core thing about the high path. It just gets better. If you look at spiral dynamics,

01:08:39.380 when you hear people talking about like the highest orders in spiral dynamics, or I hear about people

01:08:43.780 talking about the mindsets within the highest orders of their mental frameworks, society would just

01:08:50.020 be worse if everyone was at them. Yeah. That sounds about right.

01:08:54.180 They're like weird mystic gurus that are in touch with the fabric of reality and spend their days

01:09:01.220 philosophizing and blah, blah, blah. Whereas the high pragmatist, if he's in a society of high

01:09:07.300 pragmatists is just functioning, right? Like they're just working. They're trying to make the world a better

01:09:12.420 place and see their value system replicated as much as possible within wider society. But they are not

01:09:19.540 at this level of sort of intellectual freeze. I also think that the chart shows why we've hit

01:09:24.900 this stage of nihilism in our current society. I love doing the longer ones. I don't know. Do you

01:09:28.180 have any final thoughts, Simone? I think I need to understand this better before I can judge it.

01:09:32.340 Obviously, I'm not quite getting it because if I were, I'd probably find it a lot more interesting.

01:09:36.100 Oh, sorry. Maybe once one of the fans creates a chart for you or I'll create some rudimentary

01:09:42.020 chart and you'll be like, oh, I get it now. That could help. That could help for sure. But I

01:09:46.740 appreciate you sharing this and I'm really glad to have a husband here. It was just so intuitively

01:09:50.580 right to you that you have trouble engaging with people who got stuck on other branches of the tree

01:09:56.020 or thinking that they can't hurt. I don't think that's it. No, that's not it. It's more that I don't

01:10:00.020 understand the pragmatism of this itself. I guess it depends on if people find it of utility. You're

01:10:07.140 basically saying that people in the other branches of the tree will not learn from this. This will not

01:10:15.700 give them a visibility outside of their branch of the tree and because of that, it offers no utility.

01:10:22.100 I guess we'll see in the comments. Does this help people at different branches of the tree and would

01:10:26.340 people have found a person like it's useful wherever they are on the tree if they had seen this earlier?

01:10:32.500 Yeah, but thank you for thinking through this. I just love that you're constantly trying to figure

01:10:36.340 out how the world fits together, how philosophies fit together, and how things can be improved,

01:10:40.660 how people can find something closer to the truth. And I'm so lucky that you do this because I'm,

01:10:46.340 as much as I would like to think of myself as a pragmatist, I'm often stuck in survival mode in

01:10:50.660 different ways because I'm so neurotic and there are so many things that like I can't hear myself think

01:10:54.420 over a mess. So if there's a mess somewhere in our house, I'm no longer a pragmatist. I'm someone

01:10:58.100 who's in a panicked state who can't deal with the fact that there's like a turd on the ground because

01:11:02.100 there's like a turd on the ground every third day in our house potty treading. I love you so much,

01:11:06.740 Malcolm, and I'm grateful for everything you do. Have a great day. You too.

01:11:13.780 Okay. I'm actually really curious to see if other people found this useful at all because afterwards,

01:11:20.100 someone was like, I don't know. I just don't find, um, you know, mapping systems like this or ranking

01:11:26.660 systems like this useful. And as such, uh, I am very interested to see if anyone thought it might

01:11:34.180 have some utility to people. However, I will say I don't check the YouTube comments as thoroughly as

01:11:40.660 the discord. I typically read the discord discussion on every day's episode. So if you, uh, have ideas,

01:11:46.740 put it on the discord episode discussion. Um, if you put it on YouTube, I'll probably read it,

01:11:51.540 but you know, less probability and, uh, put a poll on the discord discussion of whether or not it's

01:11:56.900 a good theory or a bad theory, because I'd love to see voting on that. And I'll put the link to the

01:12:02.180 discord. I won't forget this time guys in the description.

Based Camp - May 17, 2024

Mapping the Progression of Human Mindsets： A Framework for Understanding Personal Development

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