In this episode, we discuss the differences between dark ageism and apocalypticism, and why there's a huge divide between the two, and how to deal with it. We also talk about AI and AI apocalypticism.
00:00:20.200So what I wanted to talk about, because this is something I was thinking about, where we often point out that humanity is heading into a dark age,
00:00:28.220but we also often really complain about apocalypticism in the Judeo-Christian canon, right?
00:00:35.360So if you look historically, it was in the Judeo-Christian tradition, there have repeatedly been trends towards apocalyptic approaches to the world.
00:01:18.380And these mimetic sets, so somebody was like, well, aren't your views apocalyptic?
00:01:22.340Because you say we are headed towards the dark age.
00:01:24.280And I actually pointed out something that I don't think a lot of people realize, which is that dark ageism, the belief that we are about to head towards a significant and dramatic decline in culture, is actually fairly rare historically in the Western canon.
00:01:40.480There are people who have said things are worse today than they were in the past, that it's very different than dark ageism, warning that things are about to take a dramatic decline downwards, but one that you have power over and can affect.
00:01:57.460Right, because instead the view is that there's going to be a dramatic end, just an end.
00:02:14.860And I think it's because of, well, two things.
00:02:16.560The mimetic viability of each of these ideas.
00:02:20.100And two, what they imply for the individual, right?
00:02:24.500So the biggest, if I was going to like sum it all up in one little piffy quote, is that apocalypticism removes responsibility from the individual.
00:03:05.260So if you believe in apocalypticism, you don't have to do shit.
00:03:07.740Like, you can do whatever you want, right?
00:03:09.520Like, because the world is either going to be destroyed or the only thing you need to invest in, if you're an apocalyptic, is spreading the apocalyptic message.
00:03:20.140Well, it's not just getting attention.
00:03:21.580Like, obviously, that appeals to the individual, but it also is memetically useful.
00:03:26.940A memetic set that is spreading via apocalyptic messaging is going out there and telling people, okay, just believe in the message.
00:03:36.340That's all you need to do to prevent it, is believe in the message.
00:03:38.720And the number one place you see this today is with AI apocalypticism.
00:03:41.360And if you want to see our videos on how unlikely AI apocalypticism is, you can look at our reverse grabby alien theorem video, which I think to me is the most compelling argument I've ever seen on the point, which is basically to say, if it was this easy to create a paperclip maximizing AI, we would see them out there in space everywhere.
00:04:03.640And if the reason we don't see them is because of the anthropic principle, i.e., we only wouldn't see them in a planet that hadn't been destroyed by them, well, then we're about to see them, so it's irrelevant that we're working on them, right?
00:04:14.440And there's a bunch of other answers, but watch the video if you're interested in that.
00:04:17.260But anyway, the point here being is that if I, for example, think that AI apocalypticism is accurate, right, then I don't need to invest in the future, I don't really need to do anything other than general hedonism, and I can spend all of the money I raise at the financial organization, all of my time as an individual attempting to convert people to this movement.
00:05:12.940Yeah, I wonder, is there like a Catholic versus Protestant?
00:05:27.480No, because there's tons of apocalyptic Protestant groups.
00:05:30.320I'm just trying to think of this American tendency specifically, and I haven't really seen this in other cultures, though, that perhaps that's just due to my cultural ignorance.
00:05:38.080And they get like really excited about survivalism.
00:05:41.440I mean, in the United States, there are entire industries around, you know, the, you know, building up years worth of supplies of food with your MREs that you have in your bunker and all your guns and your bullets.
00:05:53.840And like, you know, people are like, you know, people are like, they enjoy, there is an industry that is definitely built around the enjoyment of preparing for a dark age and being ready to go through it.
00:06:04.220What, what did you, what did, what culture drives that?
00:06:07.320Because I can't say, oh, like that's clearly Protestant or that's clearly Catholic or anything, right?
00:06:14.980I mean, why, what is it that makes someone a dark ageist rather than an apocalypticist?
00:06:19.840Well, I, so, so apocalyptic mindsets, I mean, I think through that you can see how appealing apocalyptic mindsets are, especially, and I think the group that's most susceptible to them are Jewish groups and Protestant Christian groups.
00:06:33.320And they, they lead to different actions within these two communities, within the ultra individualistic and rural Protestant Christian groups, they lead to this bunker building, right?
00:06:44.560But I don't think that there's any realistic vision for a societal collapse in which this bunker building is really a high utility action.
00:07:13.620If you're from a cultural group and you know this ideological set is severely seductive to your cultural group, you need to sort of offset all ideas that are associated with it.
00:07:23.060I mean, you and I may indulge in prepperism, which we definitely do to an extent.
00:07:28.800I mean, I, I, but I understand that it is largely recreational and aesthetic.
00:07:56.000I, but I, I think that when you're trying to prepare for actual likely futures for our species, it can really over index you towards futures, which is really interesting.
00:08:16.220Whereas prepperism is a seductive thing, which is different than dark ageism or pure apocalypticism in that it rewards radical self-ownership meaningfully in a way that society just doesn't.
00:08:31.200Okay, so you're really trying to separate out prepperism and you're trying to say it's not dark ageism.
00:08:37.120I would probably say it's just poorly educated dark ageism.
00:08:53.820Prepperism is about a world, a fantasy of a world in which your individual actions can matter in and of themselves in regards to family preparation or family, what's the word I'm looking for?
00:09:11.720So in a prepperist fantasy, right, the things that I do for my family, the trees I plant to grow food, the et cetera, et cetera, there are chickens, everything like that.
00:09:22.860Like these things do matter to some extent, right?
00:09:26.040But they do not actually protect my family in a meaningful context.
00:09:30.440I think there is a fantasy, especially among men, that these things will matter in a meaningful context.
00:09:39.560It is a world in which individual actions, in which this fucked up society we live in doesn't matter because you as an individual trying to do what's best for your family while ignoring trying to change society or trying to create any sort of larger community is a thing of genuine value.
00:09:56.720Okay, so in other words, it's cope when you feel disempowered by society and you still want to feel empowered.
00:10:10.500But what you're saying, implying then about dark ageism is that it is someone who is preparing for a worse future, but one in which they are shaping society going forward.
00:11:15.560People who are only interested in their own family and thinking about that.
00:11:20.720And people who are looking at a larger societal level while understanding that if they don't have a community, it is likely irrelevant for most realistic prepper scenarios.
00:11:31.260And these are two very different things.
00:11:33.520Can you give me examples, aside from you and Elon Musk, of people who are on the Dark Ages side and not just prepperism, so they're actually trying to build something for society?
00:11:45.840Well, I mean, there aren't a lot of famous people who would fall into this category.
00:11:49.460Can you give me maybe even a hypothetical example of a not famous person, but what they would be doing?
00:11:56.740They are specifically moving to networks of like-minded families that intend to share responsibilities, that intend to build systems like this among each other.
00:12:06.280If you are doing anything like this outside of a network of like-minded families, it is like a personal indulgence, like a fancy car or something like that.
00:12:16.200All right. So I'm going to say a lot of Orthodox Jewish groups and a lot of trad-cath groups are like this.
00:12:22.360But I don't think that a lot of our friends are like this.
00:12:25.780I think that they're more along the bunker end of the spectrum because they're really just thinking about it for the context of their families.
00:12:32.340They're not building any larger culture that's scalable.
00:12:36.840They're not creating any infrastructure governing-wise or economy-wise that would bring them forward.
00:12:42.500Whereas I can see with various Orthodox Jewish groups and like trad-caths in general that there is something that would start to pick up and build an influence in a future world.
00:12:58.460What we hadn't come into this conversation with, which is really helping me see things differently, is the difference between individualistic prepperism and a sort of noblesse oblige take on collapse, which is now I must rebuild or even an excitement about rebuilding.
00:13:15.920Well, no, I'd say it's more than that.
00:13:18.820It's an individualistic prepperism versus community-oriented prepperism.
00:13:23.300Are you prepping for your house or are you prepping for your church or synagogue, right?
00:13:30.940These are two very different things to be prepping around, and they require very different types of prepperism, one of which is actually of utility if you want your family to survive intergenerationally rather than just you yourself barely clinging to life.
00:13:59.200You have achieved a little bit more of meaning then.
00:14:01.340But if your kids don't have people to marry, if they don't have a larger community, if they don't have a larger seed of a socioeconomic structure that can come out of the collapse, then you haven't done that much.
00:14:12.440Especially given all of the things that you could be optimizing for, given the privileges every human has access to today in this last age of abundance.
00:14:22.000And the opportunities at play, like the fact that you really, really, really couldn't matter to a large number of future generations.
00:15:39.720I think his faction would easily fold into our faction.
00:15:42.140So his preference for monarchism isn't really that different from our faction's preference from controlled and cyclable dictatorships.
00:15:51.620I think governance structures that consolidate power are usually the best governing structures.
00:16:05.760But that power needs to be expellable the moment it becomes corrupt or inefficient, which is what all of the governing hypotheses that we work on are intended to do.
00:16:16.680I think that's what the U.S. government was originally intended to do, although it's also intended to split power a bit more.
00:16:22.700So that's a bit of an inaccurate statement.
00:16:24.480But, yeah, I think that the best governing structures do have responsibility lie on a single individual or a single small group of individuals.
00:16:33.780But that individual group needs to be cyclable out.
00:16:36.580Whereas the core difference between us and Yarvin is he doesn't believe that.
00:16:39.420He thinks that that individual should be chosen based on their proven competence.
00:16:42.920And if they're capable to be cycled out, that that would cause negative effects on the society, like they would be cycled out for the wrong reason.
00:16:52.720And he's not insane for thinking this.
00:16:54.460I mean, if we look historically, like the two, I think, greatest figures in demographic history were both betrayed by their own countries.
00:17:10.640So specifically Winston Churchill and Samistocles.
00:17:13.520Both were betrayed after saving their democracies because democracies are prone to do things like that.
00:17:20.660When a single individual is so obviously right and so obviously has an understanding of how the democracy actually functions and how to make the world a better place.
00:17:31.320Well, they are an intense threat to the powers that be within that society.
00:17:35.880And so that society, from its media to its other power players to its other elite, has every single motivation conceivable to try to get rid of that individual and to try to move them out of society.
00:17:49.400And in the case of Samistocles, he was exiled.
00:17:52.820And he actually ended up – it's really funny.
00:17:54.960A lot of people don't know this, like the story after Samistocles.
00:17:57.400So not only did he save all of Greek from the Persians in the Greco-Persian Wars very easily, like he tricked them.
00:18:05.840For people who don't know his story, there's this amazing moment where he essentially tricked the Persians into surrounding a collection of Greek fleets because all of the Greek city-states hated each other and some were planning to basically go back home.
00:18:20.720And so he needed them to be surrounded so that they couldn't retreat, so that they could all fight together.
00:18:27.580Like the level of cunning that's required to do that.
00:18:30.540But then he got expelled from Athens afterwards because they're like, oh, the average citizen likes this guy too much.
00:18:39.420Anyway, he then went to this region of Persia that actually had holidays and statues dedicated to him hundreds of years after his death because he did such a good job as a local governor.
00:18:50.720Of this, like, irrelevant region of, like, southwest Persia, I think.
00:18:55.620So he actually went to the enemies and was like, okay, I'm not going to help you with, like, any war thing, but I can be, like, a local governing person.
00:19:06.700Went to Churchill, for people who aren't familiar with him.
00:19:08.900You know, he predicted everything in regards to World War II.
00:19:12.040He predicted everything in regards to what was going to happen if Britain withdrew from India too quickly.
00:19:17.580He was not against them withdrawing entirely, but he's like, if you withdraw too quickly, this is going to have really negative consequences.
00:19:24.600The number of deaths involved in the war that was basically – so if I may give a bit of history here, what happened here is Britain, driven by the pussies who decided, oh, we're going to be anti-colonialists, they withdrew all at once.
00:19:36.600Because before, the Muslims had a chance to migrate to Pakistan and the Hindis had a chance to migrate to India because that was the idea.
00:19:44.520You're going to have a Muslim state and a Hindi state.
00:19:47.700And as a result, there was an incredibly bloody war that was completely unnecessary and that could have been avoided if people had listened to Winston Churchill.
00:19:57.780Just as a side note here, I am not saying that if Winston Churchill didn't have godlike powers and could do whatever he wanted, he wouldn't have kept India in the British Empire.
00:20:09.660But when he knew that India had to leave the British Empire, which he did accept at one point, he also saw it would lead to this war that could be prevented.
00:20:18.140And he was rushed to release India before he put in the steps to prevent the war.
00:20:23.540Also, I'm not saying he didn't have racist views against Hindis.
00:20:28.380But it is, I think, just if you look at history, I think my reading of events is he saw in the same way he saw with World War II, where he kept warning everyone before World War II.
00:20:38.160For people who don't know this, Winston Churchill's biography actually came out before he was elected prime minister, before World War II.