Based Camp - December 21, 2023


Not Everyone's Life Matters (Our Religion & the Elect)

Topics
elect & criteria
Hosted by
Malcolm Collins Simone Collins
Mentioned
Simone Malcolm Hitler Lawrence Anton John Fetterman Trump
Why Do More Rights Make Women Less Happy？ Could Cousin Marriages Fix Falling Fertility Rates？

Episode Stats


Length

24 minutes

Words per minute

184.92

Word count

4,445

Sentence count

259

Harmful content

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Malcolm and Simone discuss the difference between prophets and messiahs, and the role of the elect in our understanding of our religious beliefs. They discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each view, and how they differ from the other.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Prophets are individuals like Jesus or something like that who received special revelation and their revelation is made apparent to us both through their predictive capacity of future events and through the spread and efficacy of their message and improving an individual's quality of life.
00:00:18.960 The elect are different from prophets. The elect are individuals who have a plan for their lives, like this is what I plan to do to have this outcome on the world population.
00:00:30.000 This plan needs to, one, have been accurately executed, so they do need to have the impact that they had planned on having, and two, be in line with the will of the agents of providence.
00:00:42.880 So it basically means that they are using you as a vessel to bring about the future that must come to pass.
00:00:50.340 From the martyrdom of man, persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience, but the conscience itself will be defective.
00:00:59.440 To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty.
00:01:03.320 Would you like to know more?
00:01:04.260 Malcolm.
00:01:05.020 Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be here with you today.
00:01:07.380 We recently released an episode on our religious beliefs that primarily ended up focusing on the concept of where we think, like, truth comes from.
00:01:16.100 Like, how you can determine if an individual is a prophet, and how you can determine if an individual is being, and the will of God.
00:01:27.080 Like, how do you determine what the will of God is?
00:01:29.940 And it went into, and in our case, what we think God is, just so people are broadly aware, is we think that God is our distant, distant, distant descendants, humanity's distant descendants.
00:01:43.440 That in a million years, if humans are still around, whatever we have become in that time is closer to what today we would conceive of a god than what we today would conceive of as a human, and that they don't relate to time in the way we relate to time.
00:01:59.020 So it's sort of this self-manifesting entity that reveals aspects of itself to people throughout our civilization's development.
00:02:10.080 However, when it's explaining itself to earlier iterations of people with less technology and less philosophical sophistication, it had to use simpler explanations.
00:02:20.740 But we left that video with a cliffhanger, which was the concept of the elect.
00:02:29.080 And it's something that we can dig into a lot on this video, because it's a pretty important concept to our religious framework.
00:02:36.620 And the gist of it is that not everyone's life matters equally.
00:02:41.820 God does not care about everyone equally.
00:02:44.360 The agents of providence, we would call them, do not, not everyone is equally important in their design, and some people are holistically unimportant in their design.
00:02:55.380 Do you want to go over your thoughts on this, Simone? 0.96
00:02:58.480 Yeah, well, I would say there's a larger, I guess, bifurcation of religious and metaphysical philosophies that everyone has to make a call on this, and each is kind of an asshole for different reasons. 0.95
00:03:12.140 And I just want to make that clear.
00:03:14.360 So there's one group that believes in limited atonement, which is really what we're describing here, that some people are saved or some people are important and others aren't, and not all people are equal.
00:03:25.560 And that's not necessarily something that we're happy about.
00:03:27.720 It's just what we think to be true.
00:03:29.340 And the upsides to this view, or I would say the virtues of this view, the nice things, are that you're not going to see a lot of forcible conversions with these religions.
00:03:40.240 And we're not the only ones who hold this view.
00:03:41.980 There are lots of people who also, Calvinists hold this view, Jewish people hold this view, lots of groups, right?
00:03:47.040 And so they're like, you know what?
00:03:48.660 It's not our job to convert everyone.
00:03:50.200 We cannot save everyone.
00:03:51.420 That's not possible.
00:03:52.580 So they're a lot less coercive.
00:03:54.400 They're a lot less domineering because it's just not practical.
00:03:57.480 But then on the, like, on the downside or the vice end, you know, they're just also like, ah, those people are lost or going to hell or unimportant or whatever, right?
00:04:05.240 Like, they're somehow lesser or, you know, not saved or whatever.
00:04:09.560 And that kind of sucks because, I mean, in a, like, very PC, everyone's happy world, everyone goes to heaven, everything's good, it's great.
00:04:18.240 Then there are religions and cultural views that believe that everyone can be saved.
00:04:24.080 Obviously, the virtue there is that everyone can go to heaven.
00:04:26.280 Everyone can be saved.
00:04:27.400 Everyone can matter.
00:04:29.320 The downside there is that there is then a genuine philosophical, like, values-aligned imperative to convert people.
00:04:38.140 And to enforce your cultural beliefs on other people.
00:04:41.860 So if you believe that, continue.
00:04:44.240 This means then that if you have, like, two groups that hold this view, like Catholics and Muslims, for example, both kind of, I think, if I understand correctly, hold this view.
00:04:54.640 Not all Catholics and all Muslims hold this view.
00:04:56.960 Yeah, some do, right?
00:04:57.640 Like, or, like, really heavy proselytizing ones.
00:04:59.940 Both would believe, well, the other group is going to go to hell if they don't convert to the correct religious view and the correct practices.
00:05:07.540 So it is their imperative to, through force or through convincing, the convincing part is the nice way to do it.
00:05:15.780 The force way is the not nice way to do it.
00:05:18.100 They have to switch everyone over.
00:05:20.520 You kind of see, I would say, a secular version of this can be seen with antinatalism.
00:05:24.540 Antinatalism, where there are coercive antinatalists who would just like to forcibly sterilize or, like, literally kill everyone without their consent.
00:05:35.260 And then there's the antinatalists, like Lawrence Anton and his cohort who we've spoken with and met with a person who would, who never want to coerce anyone, who only want to convince people.
00:05:45.940 They both have the same end.
00:05:47.120 There should be no humans anymore and, ideally, no animals either, no sentient life.
00:05:52.000 However, they have very different approaches.
00:05:53.840 So we're not saying that, like, we—
00:05:55.060 I think you've drunk the Kool-Aid a little here.
00:05:56.940 I think that these groups historically typically don't try to coerce people when they're in the minority.
00:06:03.040 But when they gain control of governments, they almost always attempt to coerce people.
00:06:07.720 Well, but what we can say, though, is that, like, they're trying to do the right thing.
00:06:11.520 They're trying to do the right thing, but they don't—they're not just trying to do the right thing.
00:06:14.980 Like, if they have control of a governing system, they have a moral mandate often to use that governing system to coerce people to follow their faith.
00:06:23.620 Yeah, because otherwise you know that you can save someone and you're letting them go to hell.
00:06:27.740 You're letting them suffer.
00:06:28.900 You're letting their lives have no meaning.
00:06:30.580 And that is truly evil by their framework.
00:06:33.220 So, again, like, each one has their benefits and downsides.
00:06:36.280 Now, we are of the other group that's—we're just like, I'm sorry, I can't save you. 0.97
00:06:39.960 You're not going to matter, which is kind of an asshole move and kind of not, 0.84
00:06:43.500 because we're not going to force anyone to do anything. 0.98
00:06:45.160 So, there you go.
00:06:45.580 Yeah, it's a view that appears condescending from the perspective of an outsider.
00:06:49.960 But generally, if you're, you know, abutting another cultural group,
00:06:53.260 you would prefer that they had this view than that they don't.
00:06:56.100 Right.
00:06:56.760 Because they're going to be a much more symbiotic cultural group to their neighbors and much less dominating.
00:07:03.660 And so the antinatalists are almost certainly the most dangerous of these groups right now. 0.56
00:07:08.380 And definitely a quickly growing movement, faster growing than the pronatalist movement,
00:07:12.460 if you look at, you know, their subreddits, like the epilism subreddit and stuff like that,
00:07:15.700 that want to destroy all life on the planet.
00:07:17.780 So, really, we got to talk about that.
00:07:21.180 But, but, but, now let's get back to what we think.
00:07:23.320 Like, what do we mean when we say that there is an elect group and an unelect group?
00:07:28.760 So, we define elect in a number of different ways.
00:07:33.720 Like, there's a number of qualifying criteria to be among the elect, right?
00:07:38.020 And it does not necessarily mean that you are a prophet.
00:07:41.460 Prophets are individuals like Jesus or something like that who received special revelation
00:07:46.600 and their revelation is made apparent to us both through their predictive capacity of future events
00:07:53.700 that other people didn't predict and through the spread and efficacy of their message
00:07:59.900 and improving an individual's quality of life.
00:08:02.220 So, that's the, that's, that's how you determine prophets.
00:08:06.000 The elect are different from prophets. 0.97
00:08:07.920 The elect are individuals who have a plan for their lives.
00:08:11.360 Like, this is what I plan to do to have this outcome on the world population.
00:08:17.020 This plan needs to, one, have been accurately executed.
00:08:22.160 So, they do need to have the impact that they had planned on having.
00:08:25.560 And two, be in line with the will of the agents of providence.
00:08:30.500 God's will, you could say, right?
00:08:33.080 All right.
00:08:33.460 So, these future entities will, the future that they're trying to bring about.
00:08:36.940 So, it basically means that they are using you as a vessel to bring about the future that must come to pass.
00:08:43.820 Now, this gets more interesting because what this means is it means even if I end up having a big impact on history,
00:08:51.900 if it wasn't the impact that I intended to have, then I am not a tool of the agents of providence.
00:08:58.920 I am more just like a tool that was used to carry out wider events in the world, potentially on their behalf.
00:09:05.200 But it wasn't what I wanted to have happen.
00:09:09.420 An example here could be someone like Hitler. 0.74
00:09:11.580 Like, things definitely didn't turn out the way that he wanted to.
00:09:14.520 And yet, it would be crazy to say that he's not one of the most influential people in world history and will not be remembered as one of the most important in terms of how he changed the path of history.
00:09:25.020 Right. Like, a lot of history pivoted around him.
00:09:29.100 Yes.
00:09:29.860 But this actually comes to another thing that it means to be among the elect because there are various degrees of the elect, right?
00:09:36.380 And this is the impact that you have needs to be a differential impact.
00:09:42.020 That means if you do what somebody else would have done had you not existed.
00:09:47.720 This – earlier in my career, I had this managerial position open up at Google, and I was – I had an offer from them, and I was waiting and waiting and waiting.
00:09:54.840 And they had accepted me, but they hadn't employed me to a department.
00:09:58.620 And I ended up at one point having to choose, do I go work for this VC firm in Korea, the young firm, or do I end up going to Google?
00:10:04.860 And I asked my wife about this, and she goes, Malcolm, if you don't take that job at Google, they will replace you with somebody equally competent as you.
00:10:11.380 And you will have no real power to change the direction of the company or the direction of your product.
00:10:17.260 Yeah, like even if you did get in there and even if you did make heterodox views, you wouldn't be able to get them through given the way that their decision-making worked at the level that you've been hired.
00:10:26.280 Yeah. And so this – like if you're a politician and you're just surfing a sentimental wave, you are very unlikely to be among the elect.
00:10:33.920 You need to be surfing a wave that you created, and had you not been here, somebody else wouldn't have created.
00:10:40.020 So this is an example of like if Hitler hadn't done what he did, I think it's pretty unlikely anyone else would have done something that insane. 0.54
00:10:47.100 Well, here's another – like in terms of modern examples, and this is really more relevant to an American audience, but there's a United States senator named John Fetterman who is not exactly in our political camp, but he shows signs of what we would say is someone who's elect.
00:11:02.420 Why? Because recently he's done a lot of things that run counter to his party's view.
00:11:07.120 He's not towing the line. He's doing stuff that's getting him in trouble with his party.
00:11:10.480 It's going to make his life harder as a politician, but he is standing for his principles.
00:11:16.040 So he represents someone who –
00:11:18.060 Can you talk about what those things are?
00:11:20.340 Oh, for example, like he refused in a pro-Israel protest slash parade to support Palestine slash Hamas.
00:11:28.300 I do believe it's important that we call it what it was. You know, they systematically used rape as part of their war, and they terrorized and brutalized Israeli women, and especially young girls, and raped them. 0.95
00:11:41.960 And then after that, they actually would shoot them in the back of their head. 0.86
00:11:44.560 And I have a 12-year-old daughter, and those are the kinds of victims, you know, here in October 7th.
00:11:50.780 And we've got to call it out, and we have to acknowledge that.
00:11:54.020 And if – why you wouldn't want to protest that versus attacking a Jewish restaurant, it's part of the point that I made on Twitter.
00:12:01.120 But I also believe that Israel has the right, and they actually should, destroy Hamas, because Hamas is an anathema to peace and a true two-state solution. 0.72
00:12:10.840 And there's been some other things he's done where he, like, really is just standing for what he believes in a way that hurts him and runs counter to his party.
00:12:17.840 And I think that's interesting.
00:12:19.980 If that ends up destroying his career, then he's not among the elect.
00:12:22.760 I think a better example –
00:12:24.020 Yeah, but it has gotten him a lot of attention.
00:12:26.080 So maybe, like, maybe it will.
00:12:27.400 So it's hard to say.
00:12:28.120 And here's the other thing, is when you go back and you look at other people who hold similar views of, like, the elect and not the elect, Puritans in the early colonies,
00:12:35.460 there are these hilarious diaries that, for example, are covered in Albion's Seed, which, of course, we're obsessed with as a book,
00:12:42.600 where, like, people are – you know, one day they're so sure in their journal, like, I'm definitely among the elect.
00:12:47.840 Like, this is great.
00:12:49.240 I'm going to be meaningful.
00:12:50.320 And, like, the next day they're like, oh, I'm the most wretched person ever.
00:12:52.880 So, like, no one knows.
00:12:54.500 Even at your dying moment, you have no idea if you're among the elect or not.
00:12:58.680 You don't know if you're, like, a sapon or, like, the real deal. 0.77
00:13:02.000 And we cannot know when judging other people whether they're elect.
00:13:05.460 And that's another, like, sort of tenet of Calvinism.
00:13:07.740 It's not like – you know, you can't assume that someone who's lived the most wretched, terrible life, worst criminal ever, they could still be among the elect.
00:13:17.640 We are – it is basically up to God to decide.
00:13:21.140 God chooses.
00:13:22.320 And you don't know within your own lifetime because you don't know the impact of the things that you did.
00:13:27.580 And so to give an example of a better politician that I was mentioning earlier would be Trump.
00:13:32.760 The wave of political sentiment that Trump caused – I mean, he basically caused a total political realignment in our country that almost certainly would not have happened had he not run.
00:13:42.580 Now, we don't know if that alignment was of the will of the future police or if he was just sort of an NPC setting things up for somebody else.
00:13:49.940 Right.
00:13:50.040 And this is another thing, right?
00:13:51.440 So to Simone's point, right, so then there's this different category, which is just being a good person and living a good life.
00:13:58.940 And what this means is that you have lived in accordance with your conscience, and that conscience is a well-informed conscience, and you attempted as best you could to make an important impact that led to humanity becoming a diverse and flourishing interstellar human empire one day, right?
00:14:21.320 And you may be wrong about this.
00:14:23.860 You know, there's a quote here that is from Wynwood Reads, The Martyrdom of Man, a book that I quoted a lot, and Simone does not like me quoting too much, so I'll keep it short.
00:14:31.520 But persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience, but the conscience itself will be defective.
00:14:39.700 To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty.
00:14:43.540 Yeah, and I think that that's really true.
00:14:45.320 You can live in accordance with your conscience, but if that conscience is not a trained conscience, it is very easy to live a bad life, and a life that ends up moving civilization in a direction that was counter to your goals.
00:15:00.400 And this is another thing about this concept of the elect that really, you know, comes from what Simone is saying, is we cannot judge.
00:15:07.480 We can judge people, you know, hundreds of years ago if they were likely among the elect or not among the elect, but we cannot judge people in our current time, our peers, very accurately if they are among the elect or not among the elect.
00:15:20.080 And we certainly can't determine for ourselves, and I think there are a lot of people out there who are so sure that they're on the righteous path.
00:15:25.680 One thing that I like about this limited atonement, and, you know, whether you're elect or not, you'll never know, is that it really forces self-scrutiny, and it forces, like, a huge amount of, like, self-consciousness and self-doubt, which I think is ultimately extremely helpful.
00:15:44.860 You have to constantly sharpen yourself.
00:15:46.620 You have to constantly hold yourself accountable.
00:15:48.960 And when you don't know, I don't know, I feel like it's a better tool for that.
00:15:54.380 Yeah, another thing I'd point out here is that the agents of providence, they will sometimes use people, even to have a big impact on history, that are either meant to signal something to the elect or that are meant to strengthen the elect.
00:16:11.940 So many times when it feels like something evil has happened in the world, you know, I'm thinking potentially recent events, these events were not an accident by the agents of providence.
00:16:25.420 These events were meant to sharpen a certain other group or guide a certain other group away from tragedy.
00:16:32.080 And I think that this is a really interesting thing, and it really helps in my daily life.
00:16:38.100 Because if I am among the elect, what this means is that when something bad happens to me, when I think something bad has happened to me, I should investigate that thing for what I was meant to learn from it or where it was meant to steer me or what it was meant to teach me.
00:16:54.440 Nothing bad really ever happens to someone among the elect.
00:16:58.000 Everything that happens to them was meant to guide them towards a specific pathway.
00:17:03.820 And if you are trying to determine if you are among the elect or not among the elect, that is the one source that you can use for evidence, which is when bad things happen to you, they are a sign that you are supposed to learn something from those things, and you can begin to draw information from them.
00:17:24.300 And this can happen to a person much further in their life.
00:17:26.600 Like being an elect isn't something that's just like always obvious to a person.
00:17:29.460 It may be that like just everything is going wrong in a person's life, and then one day they're like, oh, I needed all that to happen to me so I could do this thing now that I know is the righteous thing to do.
00:17:42.040 Right.
00:17:42.480 So an interpretation not to make if a bad thing happens to you is, oh, so I must be doing the wrong thing.
00:17:47.560 That's not at all what we're saying.
00:17:49.620 Often things that you think are bad happen and ultimately are one of the best things that could ever happen to you.
00:17:55.360 Like we thought it was devastating at first when we discovered that I was like basically infertile and we can't have kids naturally because that was like a huge blow to us.
00:18:03.340 But then we realized given the size of the family that we want to have, we would not have been able to have that size of a family, realistically speaking, if we conceive naturally.
00:18:13.840 So it was it was in the end for the best, but we would never, I think, have had the mental fortitude or strength to choose to do that because it is so expensive and, you know, pretty difficult to go through IVF.
00:18:30.360 So, yeah.
00:18:31.780 You know, this is this is absolutely true.
00:18:33.940 And it is and this in terms of just like mental health is also really like people might think it's really bad.
00:18:40.700 Like you're always questioning the things in your life.
00:18:42.900 You're always questioning whether or not you're among the elect.
00:18:45.140 The belief that you are righteous is one of the most dangerous beliefs imaginable because it can lead people to commit atrocities with no introspection.
00:18:54.200 And it's it's incredibly important to constantly question whether you are doing the right thing.
00:19:01.260 And I think people who believe that they are righteous are among the most dangerous people because they're not going to question what they're doing.
00:19:07.700 Right. I think that you're absolutely right about this.
00:19:10.240 I think that constantly questioning whether or not you are actually on the right side of history is important.
00:19:15.580 And and so many people just don't do that and to look for signs as to whether or not you are on the right side of history or not and be willing to change your path.
00:19:24.940 Yeah. Well, as you as you begin in the pragmatist guide to life, you have a whole chapter that is titled, I think, would you be would you have been a Nazi?
00:19:34.880 And it was those people who didn't question, who just kind of went along with things, who assumed that, of course, they were doing the right thing, who allow those atrocities to happen.
00:19:44.440 And it can be incredibly hard to question, especially when you might be questioning behavior that differs from what mainstream society is doing.
00:19:52.560 But still, I think that, yeah, I guess that's another that's another virtue in the basket of the limited atonement camp that I do quite like.
00:20:01.040 So that's nice.
00:20:02.220 This is another thing that's that's really I mean, so I mean, I'd say if we're wording the elect in a different word that I love a quote from the, you know, the movie we use all the time in this is being among the elect.
00:20:14.440 It means that you have the courage to make the safety and prosperity of the human race, your personal responsibility.
00:20:21.520 A citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human race, their personal responsibility starship troopers, boys and girls.
00:20:29.200 Yeah, I'm doing my part.
00:20:31.060 I'm doing my part across the Federation.
00:20:33.280 Federal experts agree that A, God exists after all, B, he's on our side, and C, he wants us to win.
00:20:41.480 And there's even more good news, believers, because it's official.
00:20:46.440 God's back.
00:20:48.220 And he's a citizen, too.
00:20:50.000 So another thing that and I do have to amend something I said here before, where I was like, you can't tell who's among the elect and who's not within your own lifetime.
00:20:58.040 You can't tell among the people who are trying.
00:21:00.780 You you can definitely so I can never say this person's definitely among the elect.
00:21:04.440 It's pretty there is a very large group of humans on the planet that I can tell are definitely not among the elect.
00:21:10.620 Oh, pretty much anyone who's living for personal vanity.
00:21:13.420 Anyone who hasn't really thought about why they're doing what they're doing and is just going with societal trends.
00:21:18.840 Anyone who, you know, if somebody walks out there and they're dripping in jewelry and they're, you know, striving to be accepted by the public, they are almost.
00:21:28.320 Nope, nope.
00:21:29.020 I disagree.
00:21:29.920 All right.
00:21:30.160 First off, and this is also something that like people way more thoughtful about this have thought about, who pioneered like the points of Calvinism.
00:21:38.380 And part of this, one of the key points is you cannot know and also people who you think lived a deplorable lives that were not, to your view, in alignment with the important values can still be among the elect.
00:21:51.140 I would argue, for example, there are people in your life who lived lives extremely not value aligned with yours, who nevertheless shaped you into the person that you became.
00:22:02.080 And part of what they did care about was in making you a great person and making your brother a great person.
00:22:06.640 And they succeeded in this in spades.
00:22:08.620 Both of you are incredible people who I think are definitely working to create a humanity in which a future in which humanity flourishes.
00:22:19.180 So I would argue that these people who you would probably, per that definition that you just gave, you know, hedonic, dripping in expensive jewelry, really focused on having a good time, like they still matter a great deal because they also cared about producing great sons and they did.
00:22:36.980 Okay, okay, okay, I'll give you that.
00:23:06.960 They do what it is they need to do.
00:23:08.400 So again, I say we are not there to judge.
00:23:10.840 We do not know.
00:23:12.600 And, you know, in the end, we shouldn't fully discount anyone because anyone could end up mattering a lot.
00:23:18.980 And a lot of people who we think are going to matter could end up completely flubbing it, including ourselves.
00:23:24.860 Including ourselves, yeah.
00:23:26.100 Well, I love this conversation, Simone.
00:23:29.280 I love you, Malcolm.
00:23:30.340 Absolutely spectacular.
00:23:32.300 And, I mean, we are continuing to gain more of a platform.
00:23:36.400 Hopefully we can nudge society in a positive direction.
00:23:39.820 Yeah, hopefully we're not among the...
00:23:41.840 Right now we've been flirting on and off with the 10,000 consecutive view hours in the last 28 days.
00:23:46.760 We just passed it again.
00:23:48.220 So 10,000 hours of this channel have been watched in the last 28 days, which is pretty cool.
00:23:53.520 Yes.
00:23:54.240 Thank you.
00:23:54.800 If you're watching, we're flattered incredibly, seriously.
00:23:57.280 I love you, Simone, and have a spectacular day.
00:24:01.620 You too.